Since 2016 I aim to read at least 12 books per year. I used to be a very avid reader when I was a child, but my phone, work and now a newborn baby have made it really hard to keep up the habit.
Keeping track of my reads in a list is a super nice way to remember the lessons these books taught me and reminisce on the seasons of life that they walked me through. So here’s what my 2024 looked like in books.
1. Freakonomics
By Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Format: audiobook.
I am low key obsessed with behavioural economics. My academic background is in Psychology, and behavioural science is one of the fields I find most fascinating of all. Behavioural economics combines data and psychology to understand why we do the things we do, and how, for the most part, we’re driven by emotion, rather than cold rationality.
What I learnt
By looking at how people’s choices deviate from their objective optimal path you can learn a lot about their deeper motivations.
Information asymmetry rules the world. Like the name suggests, it’s when a person or group has more information than the other. This happens in games, with your manager or superiors, in client meetings… Personally I love exploring the role of information asymmetry applied to game theory and theory of mind. I’ve been watching BBC’s The Traitors lately and the “faithful” should definitely read up on this.
Legalising abortion reduces crime. It’s obvious, yet missing from most of the “pro-life” theories, that an unwanted child will be born into a life of poverty or neglect, which will lead to criminality and worse life outcomes. Crime in the US dropped about 17 years after Roe v. Wade.
Parenting styles don’t have a huge influence on a child’s life outcomes, but their socioeconomic status, education level and age at which they had the child do. Considering I’ve just become a mum, this lowers the pressure somewhat on how much tummy time we’re doing or wether or not I should get my baby Montesori toys. But it does kind of take away the joy of believing that my million little sacrifices will amount to much.
If you’re rich (and white) you can name your child whatever you want. Apparently only middle class families worry about naming their child something that sounds posh to see if that will help them be better off in life. Some poor families worry about it too, but it has little effect. Having a "white-sounding" name can get you more job interviews.
Something about fraud in sumo. I’ve forgotten what it was, that stood out, but there’s a lot of fixing in sumo matches!
2. The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
By Amanda Montell. Format: audiobook.
I read this book because I used to love the author’s podcast Sounds Like A Cult. The author’s background in linguistics applied to behavioural science has always tickled my curiosity.
I found that the book was funny and conversational, but a lot of the key points weren’t new to me.
Something I found really relevant to today’s political landscape is how misinformation is being weaponised to wage psychological warfare on the public and destabilise different countries. We’re living in a world of post-truth and alternative facts pushed by the likes of Elon Musk or Donald Trump.
What I learnt
It’s okay to not have an opinion and to stop consuming information. Sometimes you have to, in order to protect your mental health.
In the world of my work, this means taking a pause whenever AI threatens my playbook and knowledge, going back to first principles and staying educated without piling on anxiety-inducing predictions of SEO’s death.
3. Convenience Store Woman
By Sayaka Murata. Format: paperback.
This is a novel about a Japanese autistic woman who works in a convenience store. She faces a ton of societal pressures to be in a relationship and get married, have babies or have a career.
She loves her life and she doesn’t quite get why others see her as a loser. She ends up bringing an absolutely piece of trash man to live with her just so she can say she has someone.
I think the book is trying to parody how some women are made to feel like their lives are not complete without a man and how they end up with subpar partners due to societal pressure. That’s my interpretation of what the book is trying to say, but I have no clue if I’m right!
It was a fun read of a work of fiction. I enjoyed it while sunbathing in my hotel rooftop pool in Seville, so it brings back nice memories.
What I learnt
Japan is sexist.
I love Seville.
4. Los Capullos No Regalan Flores (Idiots Don’t Give Flowers)
By Moderna de Pueblo. Format: graphic novel.
In this comic book, the author revises and expands a previous work of hers to incorporate her new learnings and point of view. It’s a comedic, casual approach to feminist critique of relationships and the bad behaviour we accept from partners sometimes. It’s meant as a call for women to expect more and want more.
What I really like about this book is that the author willingly goes back to call herself out when she pointed the finger at the victim, rather than the aggressor, or when she presented problematic stereotypes herself.
What I learnt
It’s okay to be wrong and correct yourself when you realise. There is no shame in it.
5. Thinking in Bets
By Annie Duke. Format: audiobook.
Behavioral science makes another appearance in my 2024 reading list! This is a book by a scientist and poker champion, where the author tries to apply her poker learnings to real life decision-making. The book has some very interesting premises around what makes a good decision and I did learn a lot from it, so let’s jump right in.
What I learnt
Every decision we make (getting a new job, changing careers, hiring someone) is a bet, because there’s a lot of missing or hidden information.
The quality of our outcomes doesn’t always reflect the quality of our decision-making. We can make a great decision that leads to a poor outcome.The quality of our decisions will be the result of the quality of our assumptions. But the quality of our outcomes will be the result of the quality of our decisions + luck.
We are not rational beings: we underestimate the role of luck and we are susceptible to thinking traps and cognitive biases.
It’s worth taking a pause to assess how confident you are in the decision you’re making and the assumptions you’re basing it on. Instead of looking at confidence as a yes/no question, give it a scale (percentages work best for me).
Run a back-casting exercise with your team. Imagine that, a year from now, you achieved your goal. Really feel it and get in that space. Now debrief, how did you get there? What did you do that drove you there? This can be a good way to set up a strategy and plan to achieve those goals.
Perform a pre-mortem with your team. Imagine that you failed spectacularly and really feel it. Work backwards to understand how you failed. This will help you identify the risks and threats to your plan, so that you can avoid or mitigate them.
6. Bad Dreams In The Night
By Adam Ellis. Format: comic book.
Adam Ellis is a former BuzzFeed author (from the golden days of online media). He got really big on Twitter when he was telling the story of “Dear David”, a ghost that was hunting him, incorporating real life photos and videos. For a short while, this type of multimedia storytelling passing as someone’s live experiences was really successful on Twitter.
This comic book is a cool compilation of horror stories. I didn’t learn anything from this, I just like horror.
7. The Phoenix Project
By Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. Format: audiobook.
My husband recommended this book to me when I was struggling at work with too much to do and too little resources. It’s a book that uses a fictional story to explain DevOps principles. For me, that meant applying principles of operations to the way I run my team and organic search program at SurveyMonkey.
What I learnt
Find the constraint in your work pipeline and protect it. I found out I was the constraint. I had a lot of knowledge and skills that weren’t anywhere in the business. So first I prioritised ruthlessly and then I hired.
The 4 types of IT work applied to marketing:
Business projects: These are the ones the business asks for to meet business goals. In marketing, we’re much closer to this than IT, so it’s very easy to see and understand that this is where the focus should be.
Internal projects: These are the projects focused on improving the team’s ability to deliver and scale. For me, these included hiring and onboarding two team members, assessing our data and reporting infrastructure, finding an enterprise-grade SEO tool and reviewing our wider tooling to find unused tools, unsupported functions or tools that aren’t up to our needs.
Operational change: In my role, this is the work that I need to do to communicate the impact of my work to the wider business (think presentations, slides, reports), and steps needed for cross-functional communication (think JIRA tickets, product requests and meetings).
Unplanned work: These are the fires I need to put out. A deployment that introduced SEO bugs, accidentally noindexing a bunch of taxonomies or looking into why our CTR dropped in some searches.
The 3 ways of work:
Improving the flow of work: Removing bottlenecks and improving delivery speed. To me, this involved hiring, delegating, and assigning clear ownership.
Fixing quality at the source: To me this involved providing MVPs that can be built on. Having to re-do and re-fix things thirty times over makes us inefficient. Doing less but at a higher quality can be a way to tackle this.
Experimentation and continuous learning: This has to do most of all with how I choose to manage my team. We work together towards an outcome, which means there is no blame, just learning. We treat everything as a test and we share the measurements across our wider team. If something works, we note the learnings and implement it further.
8. Dear Girls
By Ali Wong. Format: paperback.
A colleague recommended this book when I told her I was pregnant. It’s a love letter from comedian Ali Wong to her two daughters.
Now, the book is funny, but it’s not hilarious. And, at times, it was a bit too crass for me, which is unexpected, because I feel like my jokes are usually pretty dirty!
Personally, I didn’t love it, but it was an entertaining enough read.
9-15. The Harry Potter Saga
By You-Know-Who. Format: audiobook.
I started listening to the saga during my babymoon in Japan, in a cozy lovely bed in a hotel in Kyoto. While I am not trying to support the author in any way, shape or form, I needed to find something to fall asleep to, and the Harry Potter saga was perfect for this. Narrated by Stephen Fry, engaging, but I already know what happens, so there’s no FOMO.
I don’t think I learnt anything other than how much I truly love Stephen Fry, but I had a lot of thoughts re-reading this as an adult:
Fred and George are the best characters by far, closely followed by Professor McGonagall.
Harry is terribly selfish throughout, but he becomes even more of a dick in book 5. Is it meant to represent some form of PTSD?
Hermione goes feral in book 4 and I love that for her.
The books are quite funny at times, I didn’t remember this.
Snape did not deserve a redemption arc.
At some point someone says that Sirius was Harry’s only parental figure. Excuse me? What about Lupin?
Everyone just needs to communicate and Voldemort wouldn’t stand a chance.
The writing is kind of bad and inconsistent, but the story is very enjoyable.
My reading list for 2025
Something surprising to me looking back at the list of books I read in 2024 is the lack of pregnancy and parenting books! Considering I spent most of the year expecting a baby, it would have made sense to read a whole lot more about the topic.
So far, in 2025 I've started reading about parenting (Your Baby Week By Week and Los virus no entran por los pies) and a little bit about comedy. I'm also re-listening to the Harry Potter saga, because, with a newborn, I need to be able to fall asleep fast.
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