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My 22 Favorite Books of 2024 (Out of 100 Total)
Matt Karamazov
January 01, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 48 minutes
Happy New Year! And what a wonderful year in books it was!
I ended up finishing exactly 100 books this year, and tonight I’m going to share the 22 best ones (or at least my favorites).
My full Reading List is here, and I’ve also got a Patreon book notes update going out later tonight. That’s where you can get my complete notes from all 1,300+ books I’ve read and taken notes on since 2014.
I’m still working on updating all of them (yes, ALL of them!), but I’ve been at it for a while, and hopefully I’ll have every single one of them updated by the end of the year. With new updates coming out periodically over that time.
This is a LONG post though, so I won’t make you scroll all the way down to get to my favorite book of 2024.
It was The Art of Focus, by Dan Koe, and though it’d be next to impossible to give an exact rank order to my 22 favorites, the following list is pretty close.
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
We’ve got plenty of books to talk about today, so let’s get after it!
“We have been raised to think that the brain is hardwired and our intellectual potential is more or less set from birth. We now know otherwise.
Average IQs have risen over the past century with changes in living conditions. When people suffer brain damage from strokes or accidents, scientists have seen the brain somehow reassign duties so that adjacent networks of neurons take over the work of damaged areas, enabling people to regain lost capacities.
Competitions between 'memory athletes' like James Paterson and Nelson Dellis have emerged as an international sport among people who have trained themselves to perform astonishing acts of recall.
Expert performance in medicine, science, music, chess, or sports has been shown to be the product not just of innate gifts, as had long been thought, but of skills laid down layer by layer, through thousands of hours of dedicated practice.
In short, research and the modern record have shown that we and our brains are capable of much greater feats than scientists would have thought possible even a few decades ago."
“If you don’t have a plan, society does, and it’s been planning your life for decades.”
Dan Koe’s a legend in the creator economy: a deep thinker and lifelong learner who earns more than $100,000 PER MONTH online through his courses, programs, YouTube videos, and more. He’s getting paid to learn, and a lot of his work centers around helping other people do the same. But it’s more than that…
The Art of Focus points to a worsening crisis in our society, as well as a second concerning trend that’s been developing for decades. The crisis is one of attention and meaning: basically, people are just going through the motions, sleepwalking through their days; working jobs they hate, living lives they don’t want, wondering what it’s all for.
The trend that’s been developing is the divide between creators and consumers. Between people who make stuff, and people who just passively consume it. As Dan says, if you don’t choose what to pay attention to, society will decide for you. Autonomy is the new status symbol, and The Art of Focus will help you actualize it.
“The coalition of tyrants will learn that they are loathed equally by men of all colors.”
In 2023, the absolute best book I read was The Count of Monte Cristo, a 19th-century adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas.
It’s a classic story of revenge and retribution that follows Edmond Dantes, a young sailor who’s wrongfully imprisoned for 10 years after being betrayed by people he trusted.
This is a light spoiler, but about 300 pages in (the book is 1,200+ pages), he escapes from his dungeon, finds a buried treasure, becomes fabulously rich, disguises himself and spends the rest of the novel taking revenge on the people who put him away.
This book, The Black Count, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the REAL Count of Monte Cristo…Alexandre Dumas’s father! Apparently, he was a general in Napoleon’s army (whose own life reads like a novel) and the inspiration for his son’s classic masterpiece.
You’d almost certainly want to read The Count of Monte Cristo first, but if you’ve read that book and enjoyed it, then you might also love The Black Count! I did!
“If you are going to achieve exceptional success, especially exceptional financial success, you have to break completely free of wage-earner thinking.”
I’m not a “rule-follower” by nature, so this one naturally spoke to me. Exactly as the title says, it’s an unconventional guide to success that flies in the face of most of the advice circulating out there about how to succeed in business and in life.
The bottom line here is that there’s always a way to succeed, but you’re not likely to find it by following the crowd. To borrow from The Third Door by Alex Banayan (another excellent book), life is like a nightclub.
Most people are standing in line in front of the main entrance, waiting patiently, quietly following the rules, hoping eventually to get in. There’s also the VIP line going back in the opposite direction, where celebrities and people with money and connections also clamber to get in. Then there’s “the third door.”
The third door is the one you make yourself. It’s where you go around the back of the building, crack open a window, climb in through the kitchen, slipping past security and the rest of the staff and making your own way in.
Dan Kennedy’s book helps you find the third doors that exist all around us. Now, all you need to do is find or develop the courage to walk through them.
“At that time, I was driving a 1960 Chevrolet Impala bought for fifty dollars - on payments. Needless to say, it was not 1960. With ten dollars left to my name after having paid the admission to the seminar, the other aspects of life weren’t in much better condition than the car. And this idiot was saying, ‘You’re exactly where you wanted to be.’ It took me a while to fully understand that it was my thinking, governed by my belief system, that had gotten me to that point.”
Dan Kennedy dominated the rankings this year, and Renegade Millionaire contains 7 of Dan’s foundational principles for achieving extreme wealth, autonomy, and success in business.
This book is almost like a key to all his other books, and if you’ve never read anything by him before, I’d think about starting here. You get a little bit of an autobiographical glimpse into how he came by some of these principles, but the explanations are concise, powerful, and clear.
Whereas a lot of business/success writers ramble and stumble around their ideas (sometimes covering for a LACK of ideas), Dan gets right into it, and teaches you that if you want to achieve the kind of financial results most people can’t, you have to avoid both the thinking and business practices that plague most of society.
Not everybody can become a Renegade Millionaire. Most won’t. That’s why they’re renegades - they go against established thinking. Unapologetically, with complete focus, dedication, and purpose.
“Consciousness is the resurrecting power - resurrecting that which man is conscious of being. Man is ever out-picturing that which he is conscious of being. This is the truth that makes man free, for man is always self-imprisoned or self-freed.”
Okay, so follow me on this one, because I might lose you! I can appreciate that Neville Goddard’s work might be a little “out there” for most people, but he was a pioneer in the New Thought movement who taught that the human imagination is literally God, and that we are always “out-picturing” our most dominant thoughts and mental images into reality.
Eye-rolls, web browsers closing, people leaving…I get it. These kinds of books don’t always have the best reputation - but Neville Goddard’s incredible. I’m still working on my notes from this one, but I just kept writing and writing and writing. It’s sooo good!
Anyway, even if this isn’t your thing, maybe give it a chance?
I mean you ask literally ANY Olympic athlete EVER, and they’ll all tell you the same thing. They ALL visualized their eventual victories, sometimes years, DECADES before they actually happened.
They SAW THEMSELVES at the top of that podium long before anyone else had any reason to believe they would ever make it.
Look, I’ll never turn into one of those people who promises you the world if you just “visualize” what you want, and I also hate the word “manifest,” but yeah, Neville Goddard’s books are amazing, and I’m well on my way to reading everything he’s ever written. And another of his book appears a little further down this list!
“Emotionalized thought directed toward one passionately held aim - aided by organized planning and the Master Mind - is the root of all accomplishment.”
Mitch Horowitz is an author I just discovered this year, and I ended up inhaling four of his books already. And I’ve got several more queued up on my reading list. Discovering him was like reading Colin Wilson for the first time - just incredible.
Much of what I’ve read by him so far concerns the work of Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, one of the best-selling personal development books of all time, and another of my favorites. There’s some “controversy” surrounding the origins of the book going on right now, but Hill’s basic principles are solid. I still highly recommend it.
One of the main things Napoleon Hill talked about was a Definite Chief Aim, or a single, over-arching purpose for your existence. Some goal, some pursuit that you’re dedicating most of your waking hours to. For myself, it’s reading, and my DCA is to read 10,000 books. And hey, I’m 13.5% of the way there already!
This book, The Miracle of a Definite Chief Aim goes into more detail about Hill’s success philosophy, why and how to select a DCA for yourself, and all the ways your life can be positively transformed by having one.
“As far as I can tell, the only thing more difficult than the emotional toil of pursuing true excellence is the emotional toil of not pursuing true excellence.”
This is another spectacular book about the neurobiology of high performance, and what it takes to achieve the impossible: in terms of physical accomplishments, mental ones, the whole bit. So if you want to be great at something, this book is for you.
In fact, I took sooo many notes from this one that I’ll end up with 15+ pages by the time I finish typing them all out. It seemed like I was always putting the book down again and again to make notes of what I wanted to remember for later.
There’s a lot of science presented in this one, of course, which I care a little bit about, but it’s also extremely practical, which I care a lot about. He doesn’t just throw a bunch of psychology and endocrinology terms at you for 300 pages, but really helps you formulate a plan to achieve greatness. Essential reading for all high-performers.
“Every person has the inherent right to ‘self-proclaim’ - to announce, at any time he chooses, that he is on any level he chooses to be on.”
This book is so good! It exceeded my expectations in all kinds of ways, not least in terms of how hilarious it actually is. Robert Ringer’s super funny, while also being deadly serious about protecting yourself from intimidation.
That’s what this is, by the way, not a guide to help you bully people into getting your way. I feel like this book suffers the same reputational damage as The 48 Laws of Power, with people who haven’t read it declaiming how immoral it is. When in fact it’s nothing of the sort.
Ringer started off as a real estate broker and, from the very moment he started in his career he was always getting taken advantage of by unscrupulous characters who tried to “take his chips.” Over the course of decades, he became very skilled at defending himself against such people, recorded his principles and tactics, and the result is this book.
“Never go to sleep feeling discouraged or dissatisfied. Never sleep in the consciousness of failure.”
Again, I’m just extremely impressed with everything I’ve read by Neville Goddard this year, and this short book is another homerun as far as I’m concerned. Not for everybody, obviously, but I loved it.
The basic idea is that your thoughts shape and create your reality, and you are in control of their ultimate expression. Which means, in turn, that you’re also in control of the expansion or contraction of your true potential.
All of this seems too “easy” or “woo-woo” to some people and hey, I totally get it. I do!
I’ll never sit here and try to tell you that the reason you didn’t reach your goals was that you were “manifesting” wrong or that you didn’t “believe” hard enough, whatever that means. That’s charlatan territory, and that’s not what Neville was about either.
At the basic level, it just comes down to taking complete and total responsibility for the results you create in your life, and ensuring that your every thought and action is taking you in that direction. It’s not magic, but at the same time, in a very real sense, it is.
“You can choose to feel like a loser every time something doesn’t work out, or you can reframe your situation as a winner’s journey that might take some time. I recommend the winner’s reframe.”
This is a fantastic book by the creator Dilbert, the famous comic strip, and author of one of my most-recommended books, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
I learned a tremendous amount from that book, specifically the value of systems, rather than goals, and the keys to differentiating yourself in a crowded, noisy world. This book, Reframe Your Brain, contains more than 160 shifts in thinking to help you overcome challenges, take control of your mental health, achieve professional success, and many, many more. It covers a lot of ground.
Not every reframe in the book will work for you - I wasn’t a fan of all of them, certainly - but there were some that immediately went to work on my psyche and had me performing differently, feeling differently, and living differently. Living better.
“All of them seemed to be caught up in a game of Who Has What, and yet they had everything.”
This is easily one of the best books I’ve read all year, the business memoir of Canadian SaaS entrepreneur and (former) billionaire, Andrew Wilkinson. There’s a great story behind the “former,” by the way.
Andrew didn’t exactly grow up “poor,” but he did work as a barista at one point, mopping floors at five in the morning (I did the same thing when I was younger, but at a bar), before burning the boats and building his various companies to massive valuations, eventually entering into deals with investment legends Bill Ackman and Charlie Munger, to name just two.
Never Enough is more of a cautionary tale of extreme wealth, greed, and envy. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, said it was like going to business school and therapy at the same time, and I’d say that’s pretty accurate!
I won’t ruin the ending of Andrew’s story, but yeah, this one’s a phenomenal book, not to mention one that contains a wealth of business insight and valuable lessons.
“Still, eighteen months seemed, as he put it, ‘an awfully long time to be behind bars for liking books.’”
Who among us has never thought about robbing a bookstore? I mean honestly.
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is the nonfiction account of the “appropriation” by one John Gilkey of a multitude of rare books, and the network of rare book dealers desperate to stop him. It’s also phenomenal.
Gilkey (whom the author gets to know up close and personally before her investigation is through) stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rare books from book fairs, stores, and libraries all over America. He’s also completely fine with that, does not feel as though he’s doing anything wrong, and has no plans to stop stealing rare books.
You can think of this book as almost like a less violent In Cold Blood. Like Gonzo journalism with just a tad more objectivity and distance. It’s all those things and more, and it really does read like a great novel.
I ripped through the whole thing in just a few sittings, completely captivated by the real-life characters that populate the world of rare books and literary obsession.
“To accomplish something great, you have to give yourself no escape route, no chance to ever turn back. You throw away your backup plans and you push forward, no longer bogged down by the infinite ways in which we hedge our own successes.”
The only thing that having a Plan B does for you is distract you from Plan A.
The title “Burn the Boats” comes from the age-old practice of all the great conquerors of literally setting fire to the ships they arrived on and forcing complete focus on winning no matter what. Your Plan B should be to succeed at Plan A, and this is the playbook.
Matt Higgins was a high-school dropout caring for his sick mother in Queens, New York, before burning his own boats and eventually (and I do mean eventually) becoming an investor on Shark Tank, a lecturer at Harvard Business School, and a serial entrepreneur with a billion-dollar portfolio of some of today’s most iconic brands.
Burn the Boats is such a fantastic book, and I really do hope that you’ll read it. But more importantly, I hope that you launch that business; try out for that sports team; ask out that girl (or guy). Laser in on the highest vision you can possibly imagine for your one and only life, lock in, gather a team of mentors, shut down the haters, and move fucking forward no matter what. And that boat in the back of your mind? Burn it.
“Sometimes we spend so much time trying to find how to win at life that we miss the entire point. Maybe you need to look for why to win in life. Did somebody humiliate you? Did somebody manipulate you? Is there a teacher or family member who made you feel ashamed? We’re all driven in different ways, but the right enemy can drive you in ways an ally never can.”
It turns out that having the right enemies in your life can help launch you straight towards extreme success and significance. This is a book about selecting the “right” enemies, however, and engaging your emotions in the proper way - channeling those feelings into productive pursuits instead of self-destructive ones.
Patrick Bet-David is a legendary entrepreneur who came to America with basically nothing (his family literally escaped from Iran, crossing a bridge moments before it was destroyed) and inspired millions of others to put real effort into their own personal development, curb their vices, and help build up their communities.
Choose Your Enemies Wisely explores the link between logic and emotion, and acts as a bridge between the two. Myself, I’m much more logical than emotional. Which is great for business planning, but sometimes I just don’t feel anything when I think about what I have to do each day. I don’t automatically get fired up, which can be just as harmful to one’s dreams as boiling over with emotion, yet having no actual plan.
The book is phenomenal - I’ve read three of his books so far and he’s never let me down yet - and it’ll teach you how to build a solid business plan, fortify it with logic, amplify it with emotion and feeling, and dominate your competition in business and in life.
“In my experience working with elite athletes, the ones who haven't experienced great success tend to want to know what they must do to reach their goals. The more self-confident athletes want to discuss the factors that could keep them from reaching their goals. They don't mind objectively examining the barriers to success."
What is reality? Reality is that which refuses to go away, even after you stop believing in it. Philip K. Dick was certainly right about that.
At the basic level, It Takes What It Takes is a masterclass in accurately assessing the nature of reality in front of you and building an effective strategy to help you deal with it, no matter what.
No. Matter. What.
The author, the late Trevor Moawad, was a top mental conditioning coach ("the world's best brain trainer") who worked with superstars in the NFL, elite professionals at Harvard Business School, Fortune 500 companies, the military - basically anywhere you see ambitious strivers and world-class competitors pursuing their potential, you would have found Trevor Moawad, helping them manage their negativity and achieve any goal they set for themselves.
His life's work was to motivate the motivated. Not by pumping them up with fake positivity or silly affirmations; not by wishing and hoping for performance improvements, and not by instilling a blind faith in positive thinking.
Instead, he helped these elite individuals return to reality, face the very real obstacles in their path, and come up with a plan for what to do in the very next moment, which is the only time when any of us have any real power.
“Know that if you give up, those around you will also give up, and that if you develop true resilience and resourcefulness, those around you will discover the same qualities in themselves.”
You’ll never be ridiculed by anyone with bigger dreams than you have. They honestly just don’t have the time to spare! Anyone with a real, deeply-felt vision is in constant motion to achieve it, and Brandon Dawson seems to be one of those rare individuals who both has bigger dreams and wants you to achieve yours as well.
He’s also done this whole business-building thing before, having sold his last company for $151 million and building his current business to something like a half billion dollar valuation.
I always advise that people learn from someone who has actually done the thing that you want to do, and so if your goal is to grow your business to unimaginable heights, Brandon’s your guy and this is your book.
“Our sense of identity is directly connected to a feeling of belonging. And when someone feels aligned and enhanced by associating with you, your brand, or your cult following, they will do anything for you. That sounds incredibly manipulative when I put it down on paper. But what it actually translates to is real following and connection.”
“I love the leader!” If you got that Simpsons reference, we just instantly became friends, that’s all there is to it. Okay, so, How to Start a Cult. It’s one of the most compulsively readable (and enjoyable) business books I’ve read in a long time, and it’s about building belonging, not just a business. Think: devotees, not simply “customers.”
A long time ago, Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about; today, I would add that the only thing worse than someone hating your brand is them feeling nothing at all towards it. This is a book that teaches you how to be polarizing, but in a way that attracts the right people to your brand, repels the wrong people, and lets everyone know what they’re signing up for.
In the current business environment, being ignored is death.
But even more than that, people everywhere want to feel a part of something; they want to know that someone out there understands them and is on their side.
If you demonstrate that through your message, and create superfans who buy in wholesale to your ethos and way of doing things, you’re going to build an unbelievably strong brand full of customers - followers, in the truest sense of the term - that will act on their own to spread your message far and wide.
Aside from being extremely practical and simple to read, How to Start a Cult is just…fun. It’s irreverent, the style is friendly and easygoing, and there’s a ton of valuable stuff in here that will give your business or brand everything it needs to cut through the noise and find your people.
“The good Lord gave you a body that can stand most anything. It’s your mind you have to convince.”
I don’t even watch much football and I’m still an enormous fan of coach Vince Lombardi. This is a book written by his son, Vince Lombardi Jr., about his father’s leadership principles and message.
Just like John Wooden, another coach I greatly admire, he was a lot less concerned about innate talent than he was with attitude, character, and drive. If you didn’t have a whole lot of natural talent but still possessed the latter qualities in abundance, you might still have found a spot on Lombardi’s legendary football teams.
What he demanded from his players was total commitment, not just winning.
Obviously winning was important to Lombardi. Very important. According to him, winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing.
But he also knew that winning was a byproduct of the commitment to excellence, and this book is a wonderful introduction to his school of thought.
“Perhaps because one cannot help winning if one is fanatically certain of doing so.”
The Gambler is one of Dostoyevsky’s minor classics, and he wrote it, interestingly enough, so that he could raise enough cash to pay off his own gambling debts!
The basic story follows Alexei Ivanovich, a young tutor employed by this Russian general living in Germany. He soon falls in love with the general’s step-daughter Polina, who doesn’t show a whole lot of interest in him until after he starts cleaning up at the roulette tables!
While it’s not my favorite Dostoyevsky novel, it’s still one of the best books I read last year, and it’s got plenty of action and suspense for such a short book. “The grandmother” is a character you don’t wanna cross either!
“Even if we can’t recall most of what we’ve read, the presence of the books serves as an aide-memoire, a reassuring sign that not everything we’ve read is lost. Books on the shelves are sandbags stacked against the floodwaters of forgetting.”
“Books about books” are some of my favorites, and in this one, professor Tom Mole goes beyond the words on the page, past books as merely “objects,” and into what we do with them, what they say about us and for us, how we relate to them, keep them, share them, display them…just on and on.
It’s very easy to make a book like this stuffy and inaccessible, but he does a fantastic job of, well, not doing that. In that sense it’s much more conversational, easy, and free than some academic discussion of “texts” and “discourses.” The Secret Life of Books isn’t like that at all.
If you’re the type of person who loves the feel of a physical book in your hand, who owns way more books than you could possibly count in one afternoon, and yet still feels compelled to buy more, this book was written for you.
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Oscar Wilde is one of my favorite people ever, to say nothing of writers. All the best quotes seem to come from him, something he was known for while he was alive too.
This book, De Profundis (actually more of an extended essay), was written just before his death, at perhaps the lowest time in his whole life, while he was imprisoned in England, basically for being gay. Because apparently in 1987, people were still being sent to prison for that.
The title of this one comes from Latin, meaning “from the depths,” and man could Oscar Wilde put a sentence together. Think of one of the smartest people you’ve ever met, turning his suffering into art for 70 full pages, and you’d get De Profundis.
“Victories boost aggression, and winning makes you more likely to win in the future.”
If The Art of Impossible was about the neurobiology of high performance, The Winner Effect is details the neurobiology of victory. It’s a fascinating book, beautifully put together, and it’s one of those “puzzle piece” books that helps you make sense of the world in a big way.
The above quote tells you the main gist of what it’s about, but I’d still recommend reading the whole thing if you’re interested in that stuff.
Basically, once you’ve won once, you’re more likely to keep winning, and this effect occurs in the animal kingdom, and also in humans.
Winners keep winning, and losers keep losing, and the science of how that happens in the brain and all the processes involved is really cool. I feel as though the author overuses “cliffhangers” and “open loops” in this book, and sometimes you just want him to finish telling you the end of one story before going off on another, but I really enjoyed this one.
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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