Life doesn’t get many turning points, but 2024 was one. After being tossed from the OpenAI rollercoaster, I’ve expanded work on our family office. Both kids are now in school, and my day to day is an axis between the local coffee shop for me and the BMX park for my son, with much less idle time available for reading. I also focused more on Chinese, which means I read about half as many (54 v. 120) books this year as last year.
The butterfly effect of committing to teach our kids Ren and Theo Chinese continues to have cascading consequences. We exhausted the SF Library system of good Chinese books, and over the summer went on a shopping spree for modern kids’ books at Page One in Beijing. At checkout, we were mistaken for representing a library we were purchasing so many. But the cost is worth it, Chinese children’s non-fiction books are often better than their English counterparts, and it’s hard to find other ways to keep up with modern Chinese culture.
At this point, when people ask me how I learned Chinese, the answer is less that I lived there and more that my kids taught me. Just yesterday they were both making fun of me for mispronouncing 驼鹿 (reindeer). Thankfully, between advances in AI text to speech and the growing popularity of Chinese audiobooks, I finally started to take a stab at long-form listening.
On the 4th readthrough of Harry Potter (although only the 2nd time finishing book 7), I found myself with stronger opinions about the strength of Order of the Phoenix compared to the others, as it deals with defeat, frustration, and the breakdown of allies, a theme that remains woefully under-explored when compared to the standard hero’s journey.
With most sit-down reading time with the kids and most audio time spent on Harry Potter, I didn’t make it through nearly as much nonfiction. The notable exception was Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, which is a single-volume masterclass in power, people, and biography. Robert Moses starts the book as an obvious hero, and ends it a villain as he collects power, uses it towards aims that are no longer celebrated, and locks New York into a concrete wasteland that will remain a centuries long scar upon the available use of land.
Next year I hope to keep up reading easy content in Chinese, mostly rereads, to keep my word count high enough to maintain a conversational vocabulary and listening skills. Onward to ‘25!