2024 Review: Reading, Life, and New AI Opportunities

Only three months late.

Books I Read

My reading dropped off a cliff in 2024. I only logged 30 books on Douban, didn’t touch a single issue of Duku (the long-form magazine), and my total reading time sank to 160 hours.

Here are a few that were actually pretty good.

Biographies

Whenever I feel stuck, I wonder how remarkable people throughout history handled being lost. Looking back at the biographies I picked up this year, there’s really no common thread connecting them.

Leonardo da Vinci was a genius; Vincent van Gogh was mentally ill. Put them side by side, and oddly enough, they kind of remind me of Wittgenstein.

Leonardo da Vinci embodies what it means to be endlessly curious about everything in the world. He painted, exchanging mutual contempt with Michelangelo. He was a technical type — studying light, perspective, and dissecting both animals and human bodies. He engineered urban fortifications and human flying contraptions, and closely observed the anatomy of birds.

Here is a to-do list jotted down on a page of his notebooks:

• [Calculate] The measurement of Milan and suburbs
• [Find] A book that treats of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio
• [Discover] The measurement of Corte Vecchio (the courtyard in the Duke’s palace)
• [Discover] The measurement of the castello (the Duke’s palace itself)
• Get a master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle
• Get Messer Fazio (a professor of medicine and law in Pavia) to show you about proportion
• Get the Friar of Brera (from the Benedictine monastery in Milan) to show you De Ponderibus (a medieval treatise on mechanics)
• [Talk to] Giannino the Bombardier, re. how the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes (no one actually knows what Leonardo meant by this)
• Ask Benedetto Portinari (a Florentine merchant) by what means they go on ice in Flanders
• Draw Milan
• Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are placed on bastions by day or night
• [Examine] The crossbow of Mastro Giannetto
• Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal, and mill in the Lombard manner
• [Ask about] The measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francesco
• Try to get Vitolone (author of a medieval text on optics), which is in the library at Pavia, dealing with mathematics

By conventional standards, Vincent van Gogh spent his whole life as a failure. He drifted aimlessly from one thing to another, and his friends and family eventually kept their distance because they simply couldn’t stand him. But he had a wonderful younger brother. Theo became a major patron for the Impressionist painters, paid for Vincent’s living expenses, and Vincent mingled with artists essentially as Theo’s brother. Even Gauguin only moved in to paint with him because Theo wrote hefty checks.

Van Gogh was fundamentally a tragic figure. He finished his first real piece of work in 1885 at thirty-two, and was dead by 1890. In his lifetime, his paintings were ignored and completely unsellable, leaving him living on Theo’s support. Plagued by mental instability, he cut off his own ear with a blade, scaring Gauguin away; he shot himself in the chest (no one knows for sure if it was suicide), ended up in an asylum, and left behind The Starry Night.

And yet, as spiritually barren as I am, I can always look at his paintings and feel that fierce, burning longing for life.

Before talking about Su Shi himself, a word on the author of his biography, Li Yibing.

Li was wrongfully imprisoned at fifty-six. Over four years behind bars, he memorized more than two thousand of Su Shi’s poems front to back. Once released, he sat down to write this biography.

The most moving part of the book is easily the five years Su Shi spent in Huangzhou. At forty-four, while serving in Huzhou, he was accused of slandering the emperor through his poetry and banished to Huangzhou. He was terrified and anxious, but when he arrived and saw bamboo covering the hills, he couldn’t help writing:

The Yangtze skirts the town, promising sweet fish;
Bamboo blankets the hills, ripe with fragrant shoots.

Life in Huangzhou was mostly like this: bored? Find something to do. Wander around, fish, figure out the best ways to cook fish. When friends visited, drink a little wine, hike the hills, take a boat out, write poems. If no one was around, wander the whole town making friends with farmers and fishermen. Eventually money ran completely dry, but he still had a large family to feed. So he shed his scholar’s robes, rolled up his sleeves to farm and harvest mulberries, took the style name Dongpo, built his Snow Hall, and humbly took advice from seasoned farmers: “The farmer warned me: don’t let the foliage run wild.”

Disaster hits you in midlife. But that’s life—you just get through today, then tomorrow.

History

Reading history is an ongoing process of clearing away the fog. The initial itch to open any history book always comes down to curiosity: what was it really like, and how did it become what it is today?

In the past, my impression of Xinjiang was limited to dramatic scenery, deserts, and an exotic frontier vibe. Look back in time, and the standard narrative jumps from the Western Regions in the Han dynasty straight to Tang dynasty administration. But if you take a closer look, the central Chinese dynasties’ actual sway over the Western Regions probably wasn’t that deep.

Xinjiang’s status as an inalienable part of China was inherited from the Qing dynasty. Geopolitically, it sits right in the heart of Eurasia. To the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains lie steppe pastures and oasis agriculture—a crossroads not just where agrarian and nomadic peoples mingled, but where Eastern and Western civilizations collided. That created an intricate mosaic of ethnicities, religions, and political factions. I read Uyghur History to understand ancient Xinjiang, and Fifty Years in Xinjiang to trace its modern evolution from the Republic of China era into the early years of the People’s Republic.

The Fall of the Three Capitals is the finest piece of narrative history I’ve read in years. Unlike the dry, sober tone of typical academic histories, it carries the vivid imagery and heavy sense of doom you’d expect from a novel. The history of the Song dynasties is essentially a history of getting beaten up—first by the Liao, then the Jin, and finally the Mongols. Being on the receiving end, the Song never really understood what was shifting on the steppe to make their tormentors change hands. That makes the Jin wiping out the Liao, and the Mongols wiping out the Jin, especially fascinating—and the Song played a role in both collapses.

The book puts the Jin dynasty front and center, recounting how the Mongols crushed them. Against nomadic invaders, the Song had always folded weakly. But the Jin were nomads themselves fighting other nomads, and they went down swinging, fighting to the bitter end on their feet. One year, a Song diplomatic mission visited the Jin court, and during the banquet they held an archery contest. Unbelievably, the legendary Jin archers were thoroughly humiliated by the Song envoys. The Fall of the Three Capitals opens right on that scene, setting the stage for everything that followed.

Last year I also read a book on writing that argued the best stories illuminate the grand through the microscopic: start from a single tiny focal point and unpack it deeply, instead of trying to be encyclopedic.

Kangxi’s Red Ticket does exactly that. The premise revolves around a letter the Kangxi Emperor once sent to the Pope in Rome. How did he deliver it? He ordered every merchant sailing back to Europe from Guangzhou to carry a copy and circulate it far and wide. The letter basically asked: I sent missionaries back to Europe with my imperial decrees more than a decade ago and haven’t heard a peep—are you holding them hostage? The Pope panicked and rushed a formal mission to the Qing court to explain. Haha, turns out Kangxi didn’t just correspond with the Pope; he exchanged letters with Peter the Great, too, and the book covers all of it.

It’s actually a fairly specialized study of missionaries in China; that clever entry point just makes the whole thing much more readable and interesting.

Vincent, My Cat

Vincent arrived around August. He came from the flower shop next door, born to the owner’s cat on July 1st—the same day as the Party’s founding anniversary. I happened to be reading a biography of Van Gogh at the time, so I named him Vincent. I even kept the idea in reserve that if I ever get another kitten, I’ll name him Theo—a matched pair.

When he first got home, he was barely over a month old, palm-sized, tiny, and completely kittenish. Now he’s a big cat weighing over 10 jin (around 12 pounds), stomping on my belly every morning, which hurts like hell.

At night he’s ridiculously energetic, parkouring all over the apartment. In the morning I have to check what went missing from my desk—earphones, pens, whatever. I used to wonder if he slept all day while I was out. Over a couple of weekends I watched him closely: stretched out into a long noodle, lounging in absolute bliss, sleeping so soundly I was genuinely jealous.

Having an extra family member means having one more thing to worry about. He’s great at rubbing against my legs and hands for attention. When I have insomnia at night and open my eyes, he’s right there staring at me. Whenever I head to the bathroom, even if I don’t call him, he tags along to stand guard like a bodyguard. Every day when I get home from work, he meows non-stop. In a few months he’ll turn one year old, which means it’s about time to schedule a vet visit and have him say goodbye to his “little brothers” (neutering time), haha.

2025

Looking at March 2025, my laziness has been in absolute free fall. I read novels, took a trip to Hong Kong, and bought a new camera—yet I didn’t write a single line of code, draft a single word, or snap one decent photo.

I’m trying to make up for it now, scrambling on March 30 to finish this 2024 in review post whose first draft section I had already wrapped up back on March 2.

In the last two months of 2024, I finally developed an intuitive feel for using AI, which didn’t come easily. A person gets ugly when “having seen it all” drains the heat out of them. I finally got a small boarding pass into the AI era.

For me, AI makes the path from idea to shipping clearer and more believable. Of course that still takes more effort and diligence.