Since 2010, I’ve participated in a yearly challenge to read 100 books. For 2023, I aimed to read at least 50 books as I knew this would be an intense work year. Luckily, I reached 100, thanks to some good summer breaks.

For 2024, I will try more books that are outside my wheelhouse. I’ve been struggling to find good science fiction with well-developed characters. Note, you will notice this is different from my favorite reads of 2023 on Shepherd; that is because the Shepherd book year runs from October 1st of the previous year to September 30th of the current year.

87% of the books I read were fun, and 13% were serious. I read more nonfiction this year and hope to add more in 2024. This was the most nonfiction I’ve read as a percentage since 2018.

If you want to look at past years for some reading ideas, check them out here: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

If you only read 3 books this year, I recommend the following…

1. Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman
   I adore this series. I’ve read the first three and am about to start on the fourth. They make me laugh, cry, and everything in between. The story is about four septuagenarians meeting every Thursday at a lush retirement village to solve cold cases. I love the characters (especially Joyce), as the author is brilliant at weaving in the struggles, joys, and torments of getting old with excellent crime fiction. Plus, the humor perfectly matches the dark/light moods that life throws at you. It’s made me reflect heavily on friendship, marriage, love, aging, and more.
2. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes
   This is the best thriller I’ve read in 5 years. I read this book in one go as I could not put it down. The plot revolves around bioterrorism and is fantastic and complex. I loved that I couldn’t see how all the pieces would meet back up, and how they tie together in the end is perfection. Plus, the writing is brilliant, and the main character feels real (something often lacking in spy thrillers). This is as good or better than Vince Flynn, Tom Clancy, and David Baldacci. I am looking forward to the sequel.
3. Inspector Lu Fei series
   I love detective books that take place in other countries, especially when they mix in food. Not only do I get to learn about life in that country, but also what they eat! The series is about a policeman named Lu Fei who lives in rural China. He ends up with a rural posting after stepping on some powerful toes. The author does a fantastic job describing what it is like to work in that power system and how he has to navigate the realities of modern China. I like Lu Fei as he reminds me a bit of Bosch. He has a code and must figure out how to stay true to his code while navigating the world he lives in. I’ve read the entire series, and I hope the author releases a new one soon. Some later books feel like thrillers, which is also quite fun.

Honorable mentions?

• Nonfiction? Walking with Sam is about a man and his son walking the Camino route in Spain. He reflects on his son, his relationship with him, his life, and their daily interactions on the trail. As a father, it was moving and special to read. It caused me to reflect heavily on my relationship with my son and some adventures I hope to take with him as he ages.
• History? Savage Peace was stunning in its ability to show me one year in history and make the pace feel more realistic. The book is the story of the year 1919. WW1 has just ended, the Spanish Flu is receding, and the USA is filled with hope but also red scares and terrorism. There is something about digesting history on a slower granular basis that helps me look at my own time and see the world more clearly. It is hard to articulate. We are in a weird moment in history. It feels like fascism is lurking in the shadows, a war in Europe has broken out, and the Middle East is slipping into the same violent echos of the past. This book helped me to hone in on the pace of change based on the past and what I need to keep an eye on. Plus I got to learn some incredible history that I am not as well versed on.
•  Thriller? Heat 2 is stunning! It is one of my all-time favorite movies, and Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner delivered something equally impressive. It picks up where the movie is left off but expands into something more (with both a pre and post-story). It is only available via audiobook, and I enjoyed it immensely. I hope they make a movie.
• Historical fiction with a bit of adventure? Washington and Caesar by one of my favorite authors, Christian Cameron. This was a CHALLENGE to read because the depictions of slavery and that mindset were so ugly and brutal. It is one thing to read a dry history book and know “what” slavery was in the USA, but to see it come to life in these historical figures and characters was like getting your skin peeled off and rubbed with salt. I read a lot of books about slavery in Ancient Rome, but somehow, the Americans made it so much worse. This belief that somehow x group is better than y group is just so fucking repulsive. This book is one I think every history student should read, not for the story, but for how well it puts you in the mindset of a slave-owner and slave (among many other things).
• Fun crime fiction? I am a big David Baldacci fan and picked up his Memory Man series. It is about a broken man with a perfect memory and his climb back to some life in the world (while solving great mystery cases). I’ve read the first three and just got book four. David has a gift with characters as they feel rounded and grow with the story. That is my favorite part about books.
• Fantasy? The Empire of the Wolf series and the Covenant of Steel series. I loved both of these, and they were close to being some of the best books I’ve read this year. I adored the main character in the Covenant of Steel and his growth over the series. The Empire of the Wolf was fantastic as well and just utterly unique. I can’t wait for the book 3 in that series.
• Sci-fi? It was a rough year in that area… my favorite was the Rorshach Explorer Missions. I loved the mystery elements of this science-fiction as they went from hearing mysterious signals from space to exploring the cause. Fun read!
• Unique? Babel by RF Kuang. Excellent world-building, but it felt like the intro to a story that never developed. It was a great read, and I see why people love it, but I wanted the meat instead of just an appetizer. Where is the plot? Where is the resolution? It ends with a cliffhanger, and I don’t think a sequel is planned.
• Self-help? From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. My brother and I read this together, and I found it an incredible articulation of a lot of the ethos I’ve created for myself (along with help from Tim Ferris and the 4-hour workweek). My brother is turning 40 in a month, and I am 42, so it is an excellent book to review life and where we are headed. The bit about intelligence in the book’s first part was interesting, and I am still thinking about that.

Fun day, Shepherd is officially launched into public beta :)

A TON of data entry and editing over the last 4 to 5 weeks. 409 book lists, 2305 books along with all the data and cover images, and 2,452 author profiles.

Lots more to come :)

btw, a really nice writeup here by the awesome Marton who built this :)

And, a short interview with Phil about the project here. And, another one here too. And, a nice podcast interview here on WritersCast. Another one here much later on too in the Oxford Indie Book Fair.

Since 2010 I’ve taken part in a yearly challenge to read 100 books. For 2019 I read 149 books! This is my 3rd highest ever… I read a ton of fantasy this year.

88% of the books I read were fun books, and 12% were serious. This year was a little rough as I feel like I hit a bunch of duds and it was much easier to pick my top choices. I read a LOT of fantasy and historical fiction this year.

I do a big book summary each year too, if you want to take a look at past years for some reading ideas check them out here: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, so what are my top books of the year?

If you only read 3 fiction books this year I recommend the following:

1. The Power of the Dog is a stunning 3 book series by Don Winslow that takes you deep inside the drug trade and cartels. They are fantastically written and feel like they are pulled directly from newspaper stories about the cartels. They follow a DEA agent through his career and are amazing.

2. The Gaius Valerius Verrens series is 9 books of stunning Roman historical fiction. The character is fantastic and you follow him through an uprising in Roman Britain, Roman politics, and seeing a lot of Rome from AD 68 through AD 80. The only downside was the last 9 pages were a little off, but the rest were magnificent reading.

3. Thin Air by Richard Morgan one of my favorite authors. This is a gritty detective book set on Mars and just a great read. The main character is fantastic and the story is even better. I hit a lot of duds this year when it came to hardcore science fiction and this helped redeem a lot of those duds.

After top 3 of the year, my fav 3 Fantasy / Sci Fi / Historical Fiction:

1. It starts with the Green Count and is a 4 book Chivalry series by one of my absolute favorite authors (Christian Cameron). It is historical fiction and it follows William Gold starting with his life as a goldsmith’s apprentice in London just after the great plague of 1347 and continues through the Battle of Poitiers and the Savoyard Crusade, as well as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, right through to the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, covering the history of the period—military, chivalric, and literary—in England, France, Italy, and Greece. Cameron just brings everything to life and like all his books it is hard to read the last book because you don’t want to lose the characters.

2. The Raven Mark Series is the best of fantasy, characters that feel real, that you wish you knew, and a story that leaves you unable to put down the book. This one is set in a postapocalyptic frontier that is half magic and half western.

3. The two-book series the Age of Tyranny are my final pick. They throw you right into the middle of a crazy world with a hilarious dark and messed up main character. Magic, gods, and a deeply disrespectful main character. The author knows how to end a book and I was impressed that the 2nd book was even better than the first (the ending was magnificent).

After top 3 of the year, my fav 3 *Real* Books:

1. The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. This is a MUST READ, and one of the most awesome and insane true books I’ve ever read. Lindsey and I heard the author on a podcast and the story is insane. Basically about a guy who started a business that was in a bit of a gray area and making hundreds of million dollars and then decided to become an arms dealer, drug smuggler, assassin, etc… insanity.

2. Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain. This was a hilarious travel book about two guys who decided to see how nice the people of the UK are. How did they do that? They went to the southernmost point of the UK, stripped down to their boxers and then had to make it to the most northern point in 20 days on bikes without paying for anything (including bikes). Meaning they had to ask for places to sleep, food, bikes, clothes, etc. Thanks to Tony for the recommendation!

3. The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. A hilarious story that is part travelogue and part cultural exploration. It had me laughing out loud constantly. Highly recommended!

Enjoy your next book! :)

With all my traveling 2013 was a fantastic year for reading :), I read 137 books this year which is 9 books shy of my 2012 record of 146. For a list of all of them plus mini reviews go here. Now onto the best of the year…

If you only read 3 books this year I recommend the following:

1. The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism – An utterly amazing book written by a young autistic boy about his autism. Please please please read this!

2. Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture – As a kid who grew up playing wolf 3d and doom this is a must read for anyone who did. A very well written story about the johns and the industry at the time.

3. Vince Flynn’s CIA/Military theory series that stars Mitch Rapp (around 12 books). Such a great series of books and I can’t recommend it enough. Almost as good as Clancy and it dominated my January last year. I’m so sad that he passed away this year.

Best Business Books

1. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works – An amazing book and one I hope to read every few years to refresh. The best book I’ve read on business strategy. Both practical examples and big picture approaches.

2. Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches – A great podcast too and just full of nuggets for small business owners.

Best SciFi / Fantasy

1. Brandon Sanderson is a god, he is so good! This year I read Steelheart which is this kinda post apocalyptic future with super villians; and Rithmatist which is just so awesome I can’t explain it. Both are must reads!!

2. Joel recommended The Mote in God’s Eye and I loved it. Crazy sci fi with a twist.

3. Pandora’s Star and the Commonwealth Saga. A huge space epic that is weird but if you stick with it you will love it :). Think wormholes and crazyness.

Real Life Shit

1. Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market – Super well written and a must read for anyone who wants to know why wall street and bankers are destroying your savings/future. We need more regulations on this area of finance!!

2. The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune – Amazing story about billionaire Chuck Feeney and how he grew the business, and then how he gave all the money away secretly :). Great read!

Special Topic Of The Year: Sailing Solo Around The World

I got really into sailing books, especially those around the world as it sounds really fun. So I have 3 books I’d recommend as being the best in this genre so far.

1. A Voyage For Madmen – “In 1968, nine sailors set off on the most daring race ever held: to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop. It was a feat that had never been accomplished and one that would forever change the face of sailing. Ten months later, only one of the nine men would cross the finish line and earn fame, wealth, and glory. For the others, the reward was madness, failure, and death.”

2. Maiden Voyage – “Tania Aebi was an unambitious eighteen-year-old, a bicycle messenger in New York City by day, a Lower East Side barfly at night. In short, she was going nowhere—until her father offered her a challenge: Tania could choose either a college education or a twenty-six-foot sloop. The only catch was that if she chose the sailboat, she’d have to sail around the world—alone.”

3. Across Islands and Oceans – “Across Islands and Oceans is the memoir of twenty-five year-old James Baldwin and his epic two-year, solo circumnavigation in Atom, his trusty but aging twenty-eight foot sailboat.”

2012 was a fantastic year for reading! With all my travels I had a ton of time to read and set a new record! I read 146 books this year and you can read all the mini reviews here.

If you only read 3 books this year I recommend the following:
*All of these are incredibly well written and fascinating reads. Thanks to the Daily Show for helping me to find them!

1. The Quants – A must read for anyone who likes the modern financial system and doesn’t want to see it wrecked (esp after some of the crazy days we have had since 2008)… An investigative look into high speed stock/bond/etc trading, trading AI, and a lot more. This book and others on the same subject are a big reason I don’t trust the stock market any longer.

2. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cornelius is one of the most amazing people I’ve stumbled upon and a true American story of rags to riches. Just an amazing guy! Read the NY Times review here. At his death he possessed 1/9th of all American currency in circulation. Think about that, and he was also just a bad ass, even death couldn’t take him despite many horse racing accidents.

3. The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals. An amazing amazing guy who is responsible for so many of our modern financial rules after his huge collapse :). Read the NY Times review here.

Honorable Mention (Downgraded because it is INTENSE):
What It Is Like To Go To War. One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, I literally had to sit and just think for a few hours at a time after I finished sections. And call a friend just to talk. Should be required reading for every single person in high school and discussed.

2 Best Business Books
1. Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All – I love Jim Collins and all his work, this is yet again a great read on what makes a company great.

2. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Why this book? Because I think over the next 20 years Robots are going to change the global work environment. And I’m not sure how this will affect the concept of “work” and income for so many people. Scary/Exciting stuff.

3 Best True Books
Mountains Beyond Mountains. The story of a doctor trying to make a difference, beautiful story, made me cry at a few points. Changing the world is hard.

Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. A brilliant book that me and my brother read and had a fantastic time discussing. A lot of women should read this book.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. A dense but great read if you want to understand the upcoming power dynamics in the world. Esp if you get tired of people claiming the sky is falling because the USA isn’t #1 in every category.

Best Travel Books
Weak year, have nothing I would recommend strongly :(.

Best Thrillers / Military
1. The last week of 2012 I found the best author I’ve found since Clancy. His name is Vince Flynn and I finished all his books within about a week. 12 amazing books about Mitch Rapp, an off the books CIA assassin. Fantastic, well written, awesome. Buy them all!

Best Sci Fi / Fantasy
A weak year for this category :(, the only stand out was the Repairman Jack series. Props to Laura/Karl for finding this one for me. A great read.

Best Bibliographies
Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Just a well done biography about an amazing man who was also an uncompromising dick hole. Love it!

All In: The Education Of General David Petraeus. A fantastic book about an amazing man, flawed like all of us, but still amazing. A great read.

Best History
1. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. One of the best books I’ve read and a close one for best book of the year. Highly recommended if you want to learn about innovation, the patent system, and more. Check out this great Lincoln Quote that really sums the book up.

2. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Just an amazing book about the epidemic and also the medical community at the time. Almost made the best books of the year category. Highly recommended if you want a better understanding of the medical community and the risk of these type of pandemics.

3. And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina. I love Argentina, fantastic people, amazing wine, beautiful beautiful country. And they got F’ed in the A on this one, by their bad decisions, plus the international community. A good read if you want to learn how not to govern + how not to help a country. Still causing them so many problems and it frustrates me. I hope they get better leadership in the next decade, their people deserve it.

4. The Last Days of the Incas. Great read to understand this aspect of history. The most amazing part is how a mere 60 to 200 heavily armed calvary destroyed such a vast empire, makes you realize how military technology can really do some crazy things. Very well written.

I still love love love my Kindle and I think it is the best product of this decade. In the past three years I’ve read barely any books on paper. Yesterday I started reading a paperback for the first time in 14 months and realized I was getting annoyed because I couldn’t read while eating since it required two hands part of the time in order to hold both flaps open (which is not a problem with the Kindle).

Base on my rough calculations from Amazon’s page I have bought 362 Kindle books or newspapers since I’ve had one. Plus you save money as most books are slightly cheaper!

I strongly recommend you go buy one! Here is my original Kindle review too! Batter life on the new ones is just amazing.

I don’t often post book recommendations on the blog, in fact I’ve only written two full blog posts on books this year, the rest just get a small blurb on the big list. So keep that in mind as the title of this book I’m about to recommend should scare you away, the title is Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French.

So the title sounds a bit weird but the book is absolutely amazing! I’ve visited France three or four times over the last couple years and I’ve been trying to learn more about french culture and history and this book is the answer, it is as if someone forced a book on french history, french politics, and french business outlook to have menage a trois and this book is the baby. The book is well written, well researched, and well laid out.

And a quick example, I’ve been involved with computers for a long time and I’ve never heard of the Minitel yet after a chapter of reading about it in this book I was stunned. This was basically a very successful precursor to the internet that launched in 1982, a mere year after I was born. This little networked device could do online dating, message boards, buy airline or train tickets, order stuff, porn, etc. Crazy that I’ve never heard of it.

So go buy this book if you want to learn how France works. It is great to learn more about another democracy that continually chooses a different path then the USA. And hopefully we can pull some ways to change our system out of the mistakes they have made, and the things they are doing very well.

And…

The other book I strongly recommended this year is War (Click Here to learn more about it). A documentary is also going to come out about the author and the soldiers he wrote about.

This is an amazing book and I highly recommend everyone read it, the book is called War by Sebastian Junger.

It is a must read because:

1. You come away with the clearest understanding possible of what it means to be a soldier in their own words. A bit of a cliche maybe, but you realize what soldiers go through for “us” in the worst possible place in Afghanistan. And you get to follow them home, off the front, and see what it’s like to adapt to normal society after being put at the fringes by that society.

2. It is one of the most brilliantly written accounts of war I’ve encountered. The author has amazing way to place you right in the middle of everything and he writes like a video camera.

3. And finally, you get to see from ground level what it is like in Afghanistan, which we have been fighting in for almost 10 years. And we will probably be there for a lot longer… So important to read and understand what modern warfare has turned into, why it costs so much, and what tactics it takes to win in a place Alexander the Great got stuck in.

Here is the official description:

Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit. Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.

I love the internet because a book on Amazon entitled “WHAT ARE THESE STRAWBERRIES DOING ON MY NIPPLES?: I NEED THEM FOR THE FRUIT SALAD!” is receiving hilarious reviews about the book. Which btw is listed as an import and not for sale.

Just read the 11 reviews left so far and you get such awesome lines such as:

Just hilarious!