The 2024 Digital Tonto Reading List

“Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them,” Fareed Zakaria once wrote. Others have said similar things, but I like how he said it best.
It is especially true when writing books. You can keep an email or a blog post in your head, but tens of thousands of words are too much for a single brain to hold at once. You need to approach writing a book like you would building a ship or a house, starting with a basic structure and then carefully crafting each detail to work together.
That’s why in our climate of digital distractions reading books is more important than ever. Reading, like writing, is a form of thinking. You are not only taking in information, but reflecting on it and forming opinions about it. The slow pace enables that private, intimate dialogue between you and the author. Here is the list the books I spent time with this year.
Book Of The Year
I’ve read lots of books about artificial intelligence and I’ve read lots of books about neuroscience, but I’ve never read anything that so seamlessly combined the two as A Brief History Of Intelligence by Max Bennett. It is truly a wondrous achievement and I would recommend it to anyone.
Starting with the most primitive protozoa, Bennett traces the evolution of intelligence from basic survival responses to the development of complex neurological systems and, ultimately, human cognition. At each stage, he shows how the same logic has been encoded into machines in a way that is not only easily understandable, but profoundly interesting.
Perhaps most importantly, Bennet gives us a better understanding of who we are and where we are going. As he himself writes, “The more we understand about the process of how our minds came to be, the better equipped we are to choose which features of intelligence we want to discard, which we want to preserve and which we want to improve upon.”
Business, Management And Leadership
One of my favorite business authors is Bob Sutton, so when he came out with The Friction Project with his Stanford colleague Huggy Rao I immediately picked it up and was not disappointed. Like his earlier work, it is original, insightful and well researched. I couldn’t recommend it more. Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg is an absolute must read.
I’ve been wanting to read Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss for a long time and it’s been totally worth the wait—his insights into negotiation are both practical and eye-opening, offering skills that are useful in almost every aspect of life. I’ve also long been a fan of Gillian Tett and her book Anthro-vision, about how to see things through an anthropologist’s lens, was both super interesting and very useful.
Many are familiar with the concept of a “growth mindset” from Carol Dweck’s breakthrough 2007 book, Mindset, but her colleague Mary C. Murphy offers an important contribution in her new book, Cultures of Growth. In it, she highlights how our mindsets are deeply influenced by context, and how organizational cultures play a crucial role in shaping whether a “culture of growth” or a “culture of genius” dominates. Every leader should read it.
Finally, The Science of Organizational Change by Paul Gibbons is one of the few books about organizational change that I’ve come across that is actually worth reading (and I’ve read a lot of them). As opposed to the usual bunk, Gibbons’ take is disciplined, evidence-based and helpful.
Transformation, Change And Innovation
We are embarking on a new era with technologies ranging from artificial intelligence to synthetic biology and quantum computing redefining the boundaries of possibility. In Proximity by Robert Wolcott and Kai Krippendorff put it all in perspective in one unifying vision of how these technologies are bringing production and provision of value ever closer to the moment of demand and what that means for how we need ro serve our customers.
On a more granular level, Michio Kaku offers a comprehensive overview of quantum computing in his newest book Quantum Supremacy. In a similar vein, DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman explains the potential and dangers involved in artificial intelligence in The Coming Wave and Chris Miller gives a riveting account of what drives the underlying hardware in The Chip Wars.
Over the past 30 years, Kara Swisher has been one of the best connected and insightful reporters about all things technology and she pulls no punches in her bestselling memoir, Burn Book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
History, Society And Politics
The WEIRDest People In The World by Joseph Henrich, who directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, is one of the most insightful books I’ve ever read. Drawing on 15 years of research into cultural evolution. it’s packed with profound insights.
I’ve long been a fan of books by working journalists and a number of excellent ones have come out this year. War by Bob Woodward as well as New Cold Wars by David Sanger help put recent events into context, while Autocracy Inc. by Anne Applebaum delivers outstanding insight into today’s autocratic regimes.
I also read Dark Money by Jane Mayer. Published in 2016, it’s a bit out of date but still gives great visibility into a dark world. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson offers an insightful account of what makes things popular in Hitmakers. There are many books that tell the story about the American Revolution, but few that tell the story of the years that led up to it. Historian Stacy Schiff fills that gap in The Revolutionary Samuel Adams.
I always read Fareed Zakaria’s books and snapped up Age of Revolutions as soon as it became available. In it he explains how revolutions involve three components: technology, economics and identity. It also led me to Eric Hobswan’s earlier classic The Age of Revolutions about how the industrial revolution and the French revolution ended the era of feudalism and divine right of kings to usher in the modern world during the early 19th century. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes which focuses on the scientific breakthroughs of the same era.
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So that’s my list for this year. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know in the comments section.
I will publish my “Top Posts of 2024” next Sunday and then will take the rest of the year off. I’ll be back on Sunday, January 5th with my future trend for 2025.
See you then…
What a fantastic list of books! It’s great to see a mix of topics from AI and neuroscience to leadership and societal change. I especially appreciate the recommendation of *A Brief History Of Intelligence*—it seems like a truly insightful read that combines two fascinating fields. Thanks for sharing!