The Best Books I Read in 2024

My eight best reads of 2024 were Outlive, Leaders Eat Last, The In-Between, Becoming Supernatural, The Singularity Is Nearer, The 6 Types of Working Genius, Pre-Suasion, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. It’s the widest-ranging list I’ve put together for this series — health and longevity, leadership, hospice nursing, meditation, artificial intelligence, workplace psychology, persuasion, and the state of the world, roughly in that order across the year. I didn’t set out to read that broadly. I just kept following whatever question the previous book left unanswered.

Here’s the list, in the order I read them.

Outlive by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford

Attia’s argument is that most of medicine is reactive — it waits for one of four diseases (heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or metabolic dysfunction) to show up, then treats it. His case for what he calls “Medicine 3.0” is that these conditions build quietly for decades before diagnosis, so the real leverage is in the decades, not the diagnosis.

What stuck with me was how much of his advice has nothing to do with supplements or biohacking and everything to do with unglamorous basics — strength training, zone 2 cardio, sleep — done consistently for years rather than intensely for weeks.

Read it if you’ve been treating your health like something to fix later rather than something to build now.

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

Sinek opens with the literal military tradition the title refers to — officers eat only after their soldiers do — and builds outward from there to argue that good leadership is really about building a “Circle of Safety” so people feel safe from each other, not just from outside threats. Once that internal safety disappears, all the energy a team has goes into internal politics instead of the actual mission.

I found the biological framing more convincing than the usual leadership-book metaphors — trust and cooperation aren’t just nice values, they’re chemically reinforced, and a leader’s job is partly to create the conditions where that chemistry can do its work.

Read it if your team’s biggest threat isn’t your competitors, it’s each other.

The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos, R.N.

Vlahos is a hospice nurse, and this book is a collection of the patients she sat with in their final days, told with the kind of plain, unsentimental detail that only someone who was actually in the room could offer. It’s not written to be dramatic. It’s written to be honest.

What surprised me most was how often peace, not fear, showed up at the end — and how many of her patients described the same kinds of moments in their final hours, regardless of how differently they’d lived.

Read it if you’ve ever wondered what people actually experience at the very end, told by someone who has sat with more of it than almost anyone.

Becoming Supernatural by Joe Dispenza

Dispenza’s core claim is that thought itself is a physical event — that repeated mental rehearsal changes the body’s chemistry before anything external happens, and that meditation is a way of training the brain the same way exercise trains a muscle.

I read this one with a healthy amount of skepticism about how far some of the science gets stretched, but the underlying practice — sitting still, rehearsing a state of mind deliberately instead of reacting to whatever the day hands you — is worth taking seriously on its own, independent of how you feel about the more ambitious claims.

Read it as an invitation to meditate more seriously, and hold the bigger theories a little more loosely.

The Singularity Is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil

Nearly twenty years after his original Singularity book, Kurzweil updates the timeline: he still expects AI to reach and then exceed human-level intelligence within our lifetimes, and for that shift to arrive faster than most people are prepared for, because exponential curves feel slow right up until they don’t.

Whether or not you buy his specific dates, the book is a useful corrective to how most of us think about AI progress — linearly, in a straight line from where we are now, instead of as a curve that’s already bending upward.

Read it if you want the most optimistic serious case for what’s coming, from someone who’s been making these predictions, and getting a surprising number of them right, for decades.

The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni

Lencioni’s model splits work into three stages — Ideation, Activation, Implementation — each covering two “geniuses,” and his argument is that most workplace frustration isn’t about laziness or bad attitude, it’s about people doing work that sits outside the type of genius that actually energizes them.

Told as a fable, the way Lencioni’s books usually are, it’s a fast read that gave me language for something I’d noticed but never quite named — that some tasks drain me no matter how good I am at them, and others energize me even when they’re hard.

Read it if you’ve ever been good at part of your job and dreaded the rest of it, without knowing exactly why.

Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini

Cialdini’s follow-up to Influence makes a simple but underused case: the moment that determines whether persuasion works often happens before the actual message is delivered, in whatever the listener’s attention is primed on right beforehand.

The examples stuck with me because they’re so ordinary — a single question asked right before a pitch, a word choice in the sentence before the ask — and yet they reliably move the outcome. It reframed persuasion for me as something that starts earlier than the conversation itself.

Read it if you’ve ever crafted the perfect pitch and still watched it fall flat, and want to know what happened before you even opened your mouth.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

I closed the year on Harari again, this time with his most present-tense book — less deep history, less distant future, and more a reckoning with fake news, automation, and the disorientation of a world changing faster than our institutions can adapt to it.

The idea that stayed with me longest was his point that the most useful skill going forward isn’t a fixed body of knowledge, it’s the ability to keep learning and reinventing yourself, because the specific facts and skills you’re taught today may simply not apply by the time you’re using them.

Read it if you want the same clear-eyed thinking from Sapiens and Homo Deus, aimed squarely at the decade you’re actually living through.

That’s my 2024 list — the broadest, least predictable one yet. What was your best read this year?