This year was a very tough list to narrow down, with many excellent books making part of the 92 considered for the year. A few brilliant ones narrowly missed the cut, like Surely, You're Joking Mr Feynman!, So Good They Can't Ignore You and Poor Charlie's Almanack. There was an extra focus on design and general thinking among the list as I was trying to pick up design for work, and engaging meta-learning before learning. Enjoy.
An inspiring story for entrepreneurs, business people and builders on building something that in hindsight looks simple or inevitable. The honesty about how thin the margin between "iconic brand" and "footnote" actually was is the real lesson.
Typography is at the heart of digital design and content, and this is a great reference book that helps you think of design decisions beyond the purely aesthetic, useful when building digital products.
An endlessly fascinating character that has changed the landscape of tech yet the book holds no bars on the tension around him and the rough edges of his personality. While a complicated figure in reality, it's hard to come away not feeling fascinated about his drive and obsession with taste and simplification.
Most leadership books are written by people describing their wins in hindsight. This one is written by someone still visibly rattled by how close his company came to dying, more than once.
Almost a textbook for modern and digital designers, it clearly lays out important vocabulary such as affordances, signifiers and mapping that are now industry terminology and does it in a way that breeds clarity and calls for better design for things people use.
A book that is interesting yet uncomfortable at how it points towards our hubris to not see what we don't want to see. The book's real argument isn't about markets, it's about how badly humans confuse luck with skill, and how much of what gets called expertise is survivorship bias wearing a suit.
A masterpiece in macro-history and the idea of how "myth making" collectively has driven humans forward through cooperation at scale.
A fun read from Aziz and a fellow sociologist on how dating in modern times have changed, with enough entertaining yet educational bits to appreciate our growing issues of choice overload and how optionality changes our way of approaching mate finding.
A well written book on the concepts around rhetoric and how we can pick those up as a skill as opposed to seeing it as an inborn trait.
An investigation into how the food industry engineers products to hit a precise "bliss point" of craveability, and how much deliberate science sits behind something as apparently simple as a chip or a soda. What lingered for me wasn't outrage at the industry so much as the reminder that behaviour is shaped upstream by design choices most people never see — a theme that shows up constantly in digital products too, just with engagement instead of calories as the currency.