2024: Leading with growth
2024 was a year of growth - in work, in relationships, and in how I understood myself. My reading reflected all of it. Early in the year I was reaching for management books and memoirs about survival. By fall I was deep in identity and culture, a quiet cluster of books about what it means to belong somewhere. Scattered throughout, the sci-fi thrillers were probably just my brain asking for a break.
Recommendations of the year
This one stopped me in my tracks. Written as a letter from Coates to his teenage son, it's an unflinching meditation on what it means to live in a Black body in America. I picked it up during a summer when I was reading a lot about identity, and it reframed how I think about race, history, and the systems we inherit. It's short but dense, the kind of book you sit with long after you finish it.
I didn't expect this to be one of my favorite reads of the year. Hessler spent years teaching English in rural China, and this book is his return: watching a new generation of Chinese students navigate a rapidly changing country. What impressed me most, especially as Chinese, is how he manages to stay genuinely unbiased. He doesn't project or editorialize, he just observes, with real curiosity and patience. Many of the scenes he describes felt startlingly close to my own experiences growing up, which made it both comforting and moving. It's rare to read about Chinese culture through an outsider's lens and feel seen rather than flattened.
Pure brain candy, and I mean it as a compliment. I finished the entire book in one sitting on a 10 hour flight back from Amsterdam. It's a sci-fi thriller with the premise spirals in ways that are genuinely mind-bending. It's not the deepest book on this list, but sometimes I need a book that's just fun.
2024 full reading list
Yellowface — R.F. Kuang
The Making of a Manager — Julie Zhuo
Anxious People — Fredrik Backman
Dark Matter — Blake Crouch
Butts: A Backstory — Heather Radke
The Incendiaries — R.O. Kwon
The Art Thief — Michael Finkel
None of This Is True — Lisa Jewell
Maid — Stephanie Land
Uncultured: A Memoir — Daniella Mestyanek Young
Recursion — Blake Crouch
The Employees — Olga Ravn
Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World — Naomi Klein
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma — Claire Dederer
Status and Culture — W. David Marx
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education — Peter Hessler
The Chinese Groove — Kathryn Ma
Stay True — Hua Hsu
Prophet Song — Paul Lynch
The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen
Utopia for Realists — Rutger Bregman
I'm Glad My Mom Died — Jennette McCurdy
books read
23
top genres
Memoir, Literary fiction, Sci-fi thriller
date wrote
12/15/24
.other writings
