Member-only story

The 2024 Digital Tonto Reading List

Greg Satell
5 min readDec 14, 2024
Image Generated by Microsoft Designer

“Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them,” Fareed Zakaria once wrote. Others have said similar things, but I like how he said it best.

It is especially true when writing books. You can keep an email or a blog post in your head, but tens of thousands of words are too much for a single brain to hold at once. You need to approach writing a book like you would building a ship or a house, starting with a basic structure and then carefully crafting each detail to work together.

That’s why in our climate of digital distractions reading books is more important than ever. Reading, like writing, is a form of thinking. You are not only taking in information, but reflecting on it and forming opinions about it. The slow pace enables that private, intimate dialogue between you and the author. Here is the list the books I spent time with this year.

Book Of The Year

I’ve read lots of books about artificial intelligence and I’ve read lots of books about neuroscience, but I’ve never read anything that so seamlessly combined the two as A Brief History Of Intelligence by Max Bennett. It is truly a wondrous achievement and I would recommend it to…

--

--

Greg Satell
Greg Satell

Written by Greg Satell

Co-Founder: ChangeOS | Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker, Wharton Lecturer, HBR Contributor, - Learn more at www.GregSatell.com

Responses (2)