I love going back over the list of books I’ve read in the past year. Enough time has passed since the first few for it to be a nice reminder and I get to see how the last few stack up against the rest of the year’s reading. I intentionally don’t post a rating of what I read, just a few thoughts when I finish it. Overview This was another year of highlighting the pitfalls of counting number of books.

2024 was an eventful year. The highlight of the year was my wife finishing her PhD in May. The final run up to her dissertation defense was intense, but the payoff was great and we celebrated her graduation with a party at our favorite brewery. Although I wrote last year about it being our last year in the house, she got a postdoc at the same university so we’re staying put for a few more years.

It was a week of family, with a funeral and a wedding on my wife’s side of the family. On Wednesday we drove a few hours in a very unpleasant rain storm to the funeral for her great uncle. It was an interesting experience going to a funeral for a family member I had never met. He was a pediatrician and active volunteer in his community, so he was very well known and very well loved.

I’ve decided I’m going to try the weeknotes thing that’s common among indieweb writers. For my first one, I’m covering last week, albeit a little late. On Tuesday, I had the final rehearsal for my orchestra concert on Sunday. I play trombone in the PennMed Symphony Orchestra, an amateur group made up primarily of medical students and healthcare professionals at Penn Medicine and CHOP, among other healthcare institutions in Philadelphia. The final rehearsal is always a bit stressful because anything that isn’t going well probably won’t be fixed before the concert, but this one was good.

This past weekend, my wife and I went to Manhattan to see a few Broadway shows. The first show we saw was Suffs, which tells part of the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the US, from the Woman Suffrage Procession in 1913 through the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. We had planned the trip and bought our tickets before the election, but it hit very differently after the election than it would have had Harris won.

As of today, my wife and I have been together for ten years, a third of our lives. It’s an arbitrary milestone, especially compared to the usual celebration of wedding anniversaries, but nonetheless fitting time to reflect. We met our first year of college and started dating the following year. In ten years, we’ve navigated challenging math classes, graduating from college, living two thousand miles apart for a couple years, buying a house, getting stuck in the middle of a kitchen renovation at the outbreak of a pandemic, getting married, and her starting and finishing her PhD.

I have a lot of hobbies, to the point that I even describe myself that way on my About page. Many of these are carried over from childhood, others I picked up as an adult, mostly from seeing cool things on Reddit and deciding to try them. Music was my first love. I started in elementary school with trombone and piano. I didn’t keep up with the piano lessons, but trombone became my primary instrument.

Until today I hadn’t included audiobooks I listened to in my reading list. While I gather it is a hotly contensted question whether listening to audiobooks counts as reading, I never had strong opinions about it. I didn’t include them mostly because I didn’t listen to them that often, but I guess I also considered listening a different activity. That was probably because most of my non-music listening was podcasts rather than books.

I’ve been interested in electric cars since the release of the original Tesla Roadster. After I graduated from college and started my first full-time job I eyed the release of the Tesla Model 3, thinking I’d buy one when I needed a new car. At the time I was driving a 2012 Chevy Equinox which met all of my needs. In 2019 I bought a Chevy Bolt on the last day the dealer was open before the federal tax credit for GM halved.

After another year of reading it’s been fun to review my list from 2023 since I had forgotten a few of the books I read. I wanted to highlight my favorite and least favorite books of the year. Non-Fiction My favorite non-fiction of the year was Algorithms of Oppression and it wasn’t even close. There are so many ways to criticize Google and other big tech companies, but the focus on search engines as a vehicle to enforce racism and sexism was fascinating.