I spent a good deal of 2024 reading books. Below are my favourites and the full list of books I read. You can also check my lists for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

As a focus for next year, I plan on reading less North American writers, more fiction, and more women writers (only 17 of 81 books this year).

Favourites ⭐️

Raised from the Ground (Levantado do Chão) by José Saramago

a fome é uma boa razão para roubo, quem rouba por precisão tem cem anos de perdão, bem sei que o ditado não é assim, mas devia ser, se eu sou ladrão por ir roubar bolota, ladrão é também o dono dela, que nem fabricou a terra nem plantou a árvore e a podou e limpou

How Music Works by David Byrne

It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani

This is one aspect of a reporter’s job that never ceases to fascinate and disturb me: facts that go unreported do not exist. How many massacres, how many earthquakes happen in the world, how many ships sink, how many volcanoes erupt, and how many people are persecuted, tortured and killed. Yet if no one is there to see, to write, to take a photograph, it is as if these facts had never occurred, this suffering has no importance, no place in history. Because history exists only if someone relates it. Every little description of a thing observed one can leave a seed in the soil of memory - that keeps me tied to my profession.

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

In 2014 there was a transit strike when London’s mayor threatened to close perhaps a hundred London Underground ticket offices, leaving only machines. This sparked an online debate among certain local Marxists about whether the workers threatened with redundancy had “bullshit jobs” […] Asked to respond, I eventually referred my interlocutors to a circular put out by the strikers themselves, called “Advice to Passengers Using the Future London Underground.” It included lines like these:

Please ensure you are thoroughly familiar with London Underground’s 11 lines and 270 stations before traveling . . . Please ensure that there are no delays in your journey, or any accidents, emergencies, incidents, or evacuations. Please do not be disabled. Or poor. Or new to London. Please avoid being too young or too old. Please do not be harassed or assaulted while traveling. Please do not lose your property or your children. Please do not require assistance in any way.

[…] What tube workers actually do, then, is something much closer to what feminists have termed “caring labor.” It has more in common with a nurse’s work than a bricklayer’s. It’s just that, in the same way as women’s unpaid caring labor is made to disappear from our accounts of “the economy,” so are the caring aspects of other working-class jobs made to disappear as well.

Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman

It is not uncommon, for example, to hear “teachers” make statements such as, “Oh, I taught them that, but they didn’t learn it.” There is no utterance made in the Teachers’ Room more extraordinary than this. From our point of view, it is on the same level as a salesman’s remarking, “I sold it to him, but he didn’t buy it”—which is to say, it makes no sense. It seems to mean that “teaching” is what a “teacher” does, which, in turn, may or may not bear any relationship to what those being “taught” do.

Beyond powerlessness (Sair da Nossa Impotência Política) by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie

If we want to escape from our situation of powerlessness and anxiety, we must re-examine our relationship to the political, and strive to produce new types of political practice.

Full list

Fiction

• An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter - César Aira
• The Plains - Gerald Murnane
• Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan
• How High We Go in the Dark - Sequoia Nagamatsu
• Levantado do Chão - José Saramago ⭐️
• Até Amanhã Camaradas - Manuel Tiago
• A Noite - José Saramago
• Accidental Death of an Anarchist - Dario Fo
• Nós Matámos o Cão-Tinhoso - Luís Bernardo de Honwana
• Cousas - Alfonso Castelao
• Stories of Mr. Keuner - Bertolt Brecht
• Niebla - Miguel de Unamuno
• The Ministry for the Future - Kim Stanley Robinson
• Human Acts - Han Kang
• The Invisible Ones - Nanni Balestrini

Poetry

• Par de Olhos - Inês Morão Dias
• Eu Índice N - E.M de Melo e Castro
• Trabalho Poético 2 - Carlos de Oliveira
• Queda de Neve nas Terras Altas - Rui S. Magalhães

Non-fiction

• No Time to Spare - Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Creative Act - Rick Rubin
• The Art Collector’s Handbook - Mary Rozell
• Unreasonable Hospitality - Will Guidara
• Management of Art Galleries - Magnus Resch
• Contro l’automobile - Andrea Coccia
• Sonic Life - Thurston Moore
• The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Diálogos de Colecionar - Adelaide Duarte
• How Music Works - David Byrne ⭐️
• The Curator’s Handbook - Adrian George
• Trabalho Capital - Paulo Mendes
• Utopía no es una isla - Layla Martínez
• A Fortune-Teller Told Me - Tiziano Terzani ⭐️
• Arquivo e Intervalo - José Maçãs de Carvalho
• In Praise of the Bicycle - Marc Augé
• The Abolition of Work - Bob Black
• The Communist Manifesto: Insights and Problems - Murray Bookchin
• Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber ⭐️
• Textos escolhidos - Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles
• A Escola Infinita - Eva Gonçalves
• Practical Anarchism - Scott Branson
• FIRE com Obrigações - Dama de Ouros
• Teaching As a Subversive Activity - Neil Postman ⭐️
• Terra de Catarina - Margarida Fernandes
• Sad by Design - Geert Lovink
• Botânica - Vasco Araújo
• Privacidade 404 - Filipe Cruz
• Sair da Nossa Impotência Política - Geoffroy de Lagasnerie ⭐️
• O Coleccionador de Belas-Artes - Sara & André
• Os Galifões e a Luta Contra a Praxe na Coimbra dos Anos 70 seguido de Os Quentes Anos 70 em Coimbra - M. Ricardo de Sousa & F. Carmichel
• Lisboa Clichê - Daniel Blaufuks
• The New Nihilism - Peter Lamborn Wilson
• Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art - Brandon LaBelle
• Entrevistas Corsárias - Pier Paolo Pasolini
• The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - Slavoj Žižek
• Inland Journal - André Cepeda e Eduardo Matos
• Cúmplice dos Artistas - Alexandre Melo
• I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette
• Las comunas - José María Carandell
• Lágrimas de Crocodilo - Susana Lourenço Marques
• Two Cheers for Anarchism - James C. Scott
• Sobre o Combate contra a Mudança Climática - António Cândido Franco
• Carta de Florença - Ana Mata
• A Exposição como Parcela de Tempo - Hugo Canoilas
• Portugal, Povo de Suicidas - Miguel de Unamuno
• A Arquitectura é um Gesto - Maria Filomena Molder
• Scorched Earth - Jonathan Crary
• Nem obedecer nem comandar - Francesco Codello
• Copenhagenize - Mikael Colville-Andersen
• Bad New Days - Hal Foster
• Ghost Image - Hervé Guibert
• All Art is Ecological - Timothy Morton
• The Right to Be Lazy - Paul Lafargue
• Lifehouse - Adam Greenfield
• Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
• Care where no-one does - Freek Lomme
• Wrong Way - Joanne McNeil
• O Dogma da Não-Violência - Rolando d’Alessandro
• Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma - Claire Dederer
• Bookshops - Jorge Carrión

Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. It’s not that you’re immune. It’s that you’re instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you — and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem.

— Never Forgive Them by Edward Zitron

We released another new app: QR Friend.

I was using an older Android phone for a while, without access to Google Lens. That meant I needed to get an app for reading QR codes. But I couldn’t find a decent one on Google Play. They were either outdated, or riddled with ads and unnecessary features. So we built one ourselves.

It is not uncommon, for example, to hear “teachers” make statements such as, “Oh, I taught them that, but they didn’t learn it.” There is no utterance made in the Teachers’ Room more extraordinary than this. From our point of view, it is on the same level as a salesman’s remarking, “I sold it to him, but he didn’t buy it”—which is to say, it makes no sense. It seems to mean that “teaching” is what a “teacher” does, which, in turn, may or may not bear any relationship to what those being “taught” do.

— Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman

Writing code faster or working longer hours is not the fastest way to get a project done because you can only linearly scale up how fast one can program. On the flip side, there’s nonlinear savings that can be had by reducing the amount of work you need to do in the first place. Thus, you should write less code rather than trying to write code faster.

— Software Development is Nonlinear System by Dan Lew