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These are the books I read in 2024. I’ve included a few notes. Judgment at Tokyo, by Gary Bass. This was a sprawling book. And a long one. I read it on my Kindle, and perhaps that made it seem even longer.

Forgive me if I’ve reviewed this one previously. I checked the reviews over the past few years, and I don’t find it. I’ve been cutting back on the potato chips. But I’ve been cutting back on the reviews more extensively than I have been cutting back on the new flavors.

I don’t have any more flights planned in 2024, so I pulled up my R script from last year to generate a map of the flights I made this year. Then I wondered what the flights would look like for the past decade, from 2015 through 2024.

I can still remember a profound disappointment with an ice cream flavor I chose once, and only once, as a child. We had gone to the grocery store, and I’d seen a new flavor of ice cream—a granola flavor.

For such a dangerous fruit, durian sure is a big business. An article in the NY Times leads with this: “lust for durian is creating fortunes in Southeast Asia”. The value of durian exported from SE Asia into China was $6.

I was up early this morning to write a newsletter. I heard the intermittent sound of firecrackers out the window while I was writing. After I finished writing, I decided to go for a run before the midday heat.

These are the books I finished reading, for the first time, in 2023. I’ve included a few notes. Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami. I quite enjoyed this one. It was my favorite this year.

By my recent standards, I’ve been playing a lot of golf. I started off my golf in 2023 with that round in July on a business trip. Two birdies. Then in November, I played my second round, at New South Wales Golf Club.

When you are out for a run, and when you encounter this sign, and when the only part of it you can read is クマ and the exclamation mark, it’s a bit scary.

I’ve been making a lot of business trips. About fifteen years ago, my business trips sometimes included golf. Recent business trips have included a lot of meetings, hotel changes, train rides, early mornings, seminars, data collection, and writing.