Crazy how just few years ago I never read fiction/literature. While in 2020-2021 I had to force myself to even read 1 each year, in 2022 I’ve managed to read 8, followed by 10 in 2023. And this year? It’s 20 books out of 53. I think I finally understand the appeal of reading fiction/literature that we cannot get from non-fiction.
Among other fiction/literature, this year I read Franz Kafka (3 books), Fyodor Dostoevsky (2 books), Albert Camus (3 books), John Steinbeck, and a C. S. Lewis book about grief. If you catch that, yup that’s a lot of existentialist books. I also finally read Animal Farm by George Orwell (long overdue), which turned out to be mind-blowingly brilliant.
In the re-reading portion of the year, I gave Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha a second go, where 7 years ago I started to read it with the wrong expectation that it was a biography of Siddhartha Gautama but was baffled on how different the story was from the tale that I familiar with (and it was indeed not a story about the Buddha). This year, I thought if I re-read it from the start with a different expectation I would learn to love the book (and nope, I still didn’t like it).
Moreover, this year the second most read theme for me is Japanese literature, where I read 7 books in total, including 2 heart-warming series Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (which inspired me to visit the Jimbocho Booktown in Tokyo, home to 170+ bookshops), and including who else but Haruki Murakami (2 books + 1 Japanese literature greatest hits book that featured a chapter from him).
Naturally, I haven’t forgot about my beloved non-fiction. This year I read 2 books about watches (my main obsession in 2024), few quirky books (such as Nuking the Moon, Impossible Things, and the funniest Why We Took the Car), 2 books about football, a book on Anthony Bourdain’s travels, the travels of Ibn Battuta, a much-needed book about how teenage brain works, a self-help book about influence, about how to win every argument, and about everything is figureoutable.
Furthermore, on top of the existentialist novels, I also read quite a few dark non-fiction books this year: a book on Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, an infuriating book that glorifies Mossad’s crimes, an eye-opening book about the Holocaust Industry, a book about Native American genocide, about what really happened in Jakarta in the 31 September 1965 coup, about Churchill Hitler and the Unnecessary War, The Anarchist Cookbook, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s story about his experience in the transition between living in British Mandate Palestine to the Israeli occupation, and the most mind-blowing of all this year, the dark history of Jazz music (stretching from 1910s-1960s) and its relationship with the criminal underworld.
And then of course, the usual names that I read every year: Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, Karen Armstrong, Ernest Hemingway. A special note for Ryan Holiday, my number 1 favourite author, whom I’ve read 12 out of his 15 books and read his daily mailing list every day for the past 5 years: funny how quickly people can fall from grace (at least in front of my eyes) by just revealing who they really are. Read my review on his book (Right Thing, Right Now) for more detail.
Anyway, here are the full list of books that I’ve read in 2024:
- Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast by Oscar Wilde
- The Holocaust Industry by Normal Finkelstein
- Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
- The Daily Laws by Robert Greene
- The Daily Dad by Ryan Holiday
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
- My Turn: A Life of Total Football by Johan Cruyff
- Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- A Man & His Watch by Matt Hranek
- A History of God by Karen Armstrong
- Islam yang Disalahpahami by M. Quraish Shihab
- Secrets of Divine Love by A. Helwa
- The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta by David Waines
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Hands of Time: A Watchmaker History of Time by Rebecca Struthers
- The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Win Every Argument by Mehdi Hasan
- World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever
- The Religions Book by DK
- What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
- Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
- Right Things, Right Now by Ryan Holiday
- More Days at the Morisaki Bookstore by Satoshi Yagisawa
- The Teenage Brain by Frances Jensen
- White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki
- Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
- Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal
- Short Stories in Japanese by Michael Emmerich
- Influence by Robert Cialdini
- Wahyu Yang Hilang Negeri Yang Guncang by Ong Hok Ham
- Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board by Vince Houghton
- Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Dangerous Rhythyms: Jazz and the Underworld by T. J. English
- Transcending the Levels of Consciousness by David R. Hawkings
- Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
- In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka
- A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
- Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- Impossible Things: Unbelievable Answers to the World’s Weirdest Questions by Dan Schreiber
- The Fall by Albert Camus
- Pol Pot’s Little Red Book by Henri Locard
- Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo
- The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
- The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper by Jonathan Wilson
THE CHAOS THEORY 