Reading in 2024

2024 was the year in which I gave up all social media with the grudging exception of Whatsapp and I used all the time that got freed up in reading discipline. That led me to finishing 30 books, most of which I really enjoyed. The other unusual thing this year was that nearly every other book I read this year was fiction, which in the past few years constituted only a third of my reading (even that was because I was part of a book club that I was trying hard to fit into). 

So here's the list starting with 'fiction'. I ended up reading six of the seven books on the Booker shortlist.  Although I loved 'Orbital' my own personal Booker went to Creation Lake.

• Stoneyard Devotional - Charlotte Wood
• The Midnight Library - Matt Haig
• James - Percival Everett
• Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner
• Orbital - Samantha Harvey
• The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden

The other fiction I managed to complete (every single one of which I recommend to anyone reading this)

• Samarkand - Amin Malouf
• New York - Edward Rutherford
• Every Man Dies Alone - Hans Fallada
• The Lincoln Highway - Amor Towles
• A Man's Place - Annie Ernaux
• Resurrection Day - Brendan DuBois
• The Beekeeper of Aleppo - Christy Lefteri
• Foster - Claire Keegan

Among the non-fiction list of this year, I really enjoyed the ones in the history genre

• The Golden Road - William Dalrymple
• Gorbachev : His Life and Times - William Taubman
• Anansi's Gold: The man who swindled the world - Yepoko Yeebo

These four from the Science shelf also were very enjoyable

• Behave - Robert M Sapolsky
• Being You: A New Science of Consciousness - Anil Seth
• Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life - Jason Roberts
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot

The rest of this year's list

• The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick
• Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever - Joseph Cox
• The Golden Road - William Dalrymple
• Gorbachev : His Life and Times - William Taubman
• Anansi's Gold: The man who swindled the world - Yepoko Yeebo
• Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial - Janet Williams
• I'm Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy
• Maurice and Maralyn - Sophie Elmhirst 
• The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt
• What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? - Stephen Wolfram
• A Beginner’s Guide to Japan - Pico Iyer

Reading in 2023

Every year, I enjoy the ritual of looking back on the stack of books I burned through and writing short notes on them. There's something about the 2023 list that's making me pause and reflect longer, because this year wasn't just about the books but the people; those who gifted me the books, those who borrowed from me, and those who stayed back to have memorable discussions about their impressions. 

The list from 2023 has to start with one of the best non-fiction books that I've read, and I don't mean just in this year. An Immense World took on a fascinating topic and wrote about it with so much depth and elegance that I wanted everyone else in my life to read it too. At last count, I know ten other people that read it because they couldn't believe how effusive my praise was for the book. 

• An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us - Ed Yong

This year's list has a strong proportion of fiction in it, bucking a decade long trend. 

• Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
• ಸಂಸ್ಕಾರ (Samskara) - U R Ananthamurthy
• Prophet Song - Peter Lynch
• The Trees - Percival Everett
• The Quiet American - Graham Greene
• The Forest of Enchantments - Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni
• Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
• A Passage North - Anuk Arudpragasam
• The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
• Piranesi - Susanna Clark

I really enjoyed the History I consumed this year. The last one in this list was a surprise. The title - Don't Forward That Text! - really undersells the depth and research that went into this one. Mr. Schandillia is a super storyteller. 

• The Buddha and the Sahibs - Charles Allen
• Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization - Namit Arora
• Origins: How The Earth Shaped Human History - Lewis Dartnell
• Don't Forward That Text! - Amit Schandillia

The next three were, in some way or the other, related to personal health and all caused me to make some deep changes in the way I live, eat or exercise. 

• I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us And a Grander View of Life
• Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest And Health - Daniel Lieberman
• Outlive - Peter Attia

The rest of the list is a motley mix. Many of them were part of the official book club at my workplace. I may remember better the discussions than the books themselves. I also mention 'official' because there were a lot of other smaller groups of reading groups at work where my friends not only recommended a book, but in some cases shipped me a copy because they couldn't bear me not having read it. I'll remember these very fondly. 

• Mother of God: One Man's Journey to the Uncharted Depths of the Amazon Rainforest - Paul Rosolie
• American Kingpin - Nick Bilton
• Hatching Twitter - Nick Bilton
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis
• Shoe Dog - Phil Knight
• The Art of the Good Life - Rolf Dobelli 
• Whole Numbers and Half Truths - Rukmini S
• The Sun Does Shine - Anthony Ray Hinton

Reading in 2022

This was a year in which I obsessively read history, and so I begin with the books that I really enjoyed. 

India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 - Richard M. Eaton

Lords of the Deccan:Southern India from Chalukyas to Cholas: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas

Energy: A Human History - Richard Rhodes

For almost all of childhood, Cubbon park, the green space adjoining our school, was a big part of growing up. This book below was a short read about the fascinating history of the park and the role it has come to play in the city 

Cubbon Park: The Green Heart of Bengaluru - Roopa Pai

I also ended up reading two remarkable memoirs that made a deep impression. 

Educated - Tara Westover
When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

Early on in the year I started managing the design process at work and I realised that I needed to spend some time formally acquainting myself with the vocabulary. This was a good start. 
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited - Steve Krug 

I read three works of fiction but none made a lasting impression. 

Elena Knows - Claudia Piñeiro

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Heaven - Mieko Kawakami

This tome took me a while to finish, but it was a fascinating window into how seriously Dr. Ambedkar took his whole exploration into Buddhism. 

The Buddha & His Dhamma - Dr. B.R Ambedkar

And finally, some of the other miscellaneous reading I managed to finish. 
Consolations - David Whyte
Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton
The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty - Patrick Radden Keefe
Parliament of Whores - P.J. O'Rourke
Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe - Steven Strogatz

Reading in 2020

As an introvert most days of the week, I've always favoured a good book even over wholesome social interactions. Expectedly, this period in which the pandemic forced us indoors was good for reading.

Let me start with the book that caused the biggest "viewquake" for me. As a parent, the biggest takeaway from DNA was how little my parenting actually influences a child's eventual personality. Strangely, instead of making me feel helpless the realisation actually made me feel free.

* Blueprint – How DNA Makes Us Who We Are - Robert Plomin

I came across Jugalbandi in the Seen and the Unseen podcast where the host Amit Verma engaged with the author in a nearly 3-hr conversation on Indian politic's most fascinating pairing - Vajpayee and Advani. Most liberal portraits of these two men tend to paint them as simplistic good and evil pairing. Sitapati's storytelling lends so much more color, nuance and detail to them. Most interestingly, you understand why the combined biography makes sense, because so much of what transpired can only be explained as the result of that peculiar combination. As soon as I finished this book, I picked up the author's other biography of who I believe is India's most underrated Prime Ministers. 

* Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi - Vinay Sitapati
* Half-Lion: How P.V.Narasimha Rao Transformed India - Vinay Sitapati

There was more history in the portfolio this year. The popular caricature of Genghis Khan being an unsophisticated marauding conqueror always ringed false to me. It just didn't make sense that he could stitch together such a large empire without a method to it. This biography filled in those details for me. 

* Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern - Jack Weatherford

Among bloggers that I follow, Scott Galloway is one of my favourite thinkers. Much of what this book has to say was already said in his newsletters and posts, but it was still rewarding to read them together in this collection. 

* Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity - Scott Galloway

We started a book club in office this year, and I credit my colleagues with introducing me to these books that I probably wouldn't have read otherwise.  

* Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood - Trevor Noah 

* Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

* Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man - Lynn Vincent, Sara Vladic

My relationship with self-help books has shifted over the years. I held them in contempt in my 20's, consumed them surreptitiously in my 30's, but now I'm a completely unabashed about reading them. Even the not-so-well written books give me a structured way of thinking about various aspects of life, and I can't see the harm from that. 
* The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg

* Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive - Charles Duhigg

* The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life - Mark Manson

* Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life - Hector Garcia & Frances Mirales


Here's the rest of the list from this year. 

* Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - Isabel Wilkerson
* Lord of the Flies - William Golding
* Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History - Liam Vaughan
* Apropos of Nothing - Woody Allen
* Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
* Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher - Richard Feynman

Reading in 2019

It's nearly May of 2020, and I finally decided I've procrastinated this enough. So here's my reading list for 2019.  

Top recommendations

• Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt: While my reading for the last few years has been predominantly non-fiction, very few books make the kind of impression that the Righteous Mind. As a classical liberal with a slight left-lean, I've struggled with truly understanding the conservative view points, and I've been fairly troubled with the rise of the right all over the world. After this book, some how, it all made a lot more sense. This one was a definite viewquake, to borrow from Robin Hanson's dictionary. 
• Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker: If Righteous Mind made the biggest difference to my worldview, Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep forced the most number of practical changes to my life. I've stopped using an alarm clock altogether, all the lights at home turn yellow at home, and I've barely sacrificed sleep for anything else (work, exercise) if I could help it. 
• The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert: I've grown increasingly fatalist/defeatist about humanity's ability to tackle climate change. I can't tell if books like this force me out of the stupor or push me deeper into cynical resignation. Either way, this is a fascinating book. 
• The Fish that Ate the Whale - Rich Cohen: Everytime I read a book on history I come away marvelling at our modern education system's ability to take such an interesting subject and make it as boring as they do. Who new the humble fruit had such a role to play in shaping modern geopolitics? 
• Maus - Art Spiegelman: I feel like I've read so many books on holocaust that nothing on that topic can shock me anymore, but Maus still did. Probably because of the novelty of the format.
• A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles: One of only two fiction books that I read this year. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
• Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck

Second-tier recommendations

• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying - Marie Kondo
• Early Indians - Tony Joseph
• I'll be Gone in the Dark - Michelle McNamara
• The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu & Ken Liu
• Zero to One - Peter Thiel
• Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac
• The Algebra of Happiness - Scott Galloway
• Sense of An Ending - Julian Barnes
• Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World- David Epstein

Some other books I read didn't make that much of an impression for various reasons

• Classical Music of India - L. Subramaniam and Viji Subramaniam: While the subject fascinates me no end, I realise my vocabulary and comprehension of the basics are still too raw for me to understand everything in this book. I'm sure I'll return to it some other time. 
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari: After having read his first two, the topics and the treatment in this book didn't really trigger the thought processes that much. 

Reading in 2018

This is the year in which I made one key change to my reading habit which was influenced by a post from Tim Urban titled ‘The Tail End’. The gist is the following. I manage to read at roughly the rate of a book a month, and I turned forty recently. So even if I live to be ninety, I’m going to read around 600 books more. Millions of books have been written and catalogued and there are thousands more to come in my lifetime, but the sobering conclusion is that I only have time left to read 600. That insight destroyed an enduring superstition that most booklovers seem to carry, which is to persist with a book once you have started it. This year I abandoned books ruthlessly but here are the ones I managed to complete.

Fiction

Three remarkable books by three different authors hailing from different parts of the globe.

• White Teeth - Zadie Smith
• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
• Pachinko - Min Jin Lee

Though I started this piece with how limited my overall reading time is I still reread two classics for two reasons. First, the key to reading productivity is to read what you like and there’s no better test of likability than to know that you’ve read it once and liked it. Second, there’s always more value left to derive from the truly great classics. I read Slaughterhouse and 2001 nearly a decade after I first read them and it was as refreshing to read them now as I remember feeling back then. One thing to note was how little I remembered of the details in each of these books that I professed to like, and I now realise, the primary aim from good fiction is to be affected by it, and not to remember details.

• Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut (Reread)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C Clarke 

Non-Fiction

• Seven Brief Lessons on Physics - Carlo Rovelli This is another book that I reread within this year and I suspect I’ll be coming back to it several more times. 
• Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past - David Reich 
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup - John Carreyrou
• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - Hans Rosling
• The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life - Robin Hanson, Kevin Simler
• Your Money or Your Life - Vicki Robin

Reading in 2017

Cuckold - Kiran Nagarkar

It baffles me that Kiran Nagarkar doesn’t get the coverage that other Indian authors of English get. For me, Cuckold, is right up there with Midnight’s Children.

“Being in the right has got nothing to do with courage or exceptional bravery. The forces of evil will fight just as enthusiastically or fiercely as the armies of righteousness.”

Everybody Lies - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Reading) 

Only 7% of the people who started Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow are believed to have finished it. That number for Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is 3%. How do we know this? Not through surveys, but the number of highlights people make while reading these books on Kindle. Everybody Lies tries to understand the human psyche through a surprisingly rich and revealing source, out collective online behaviour.

The Lost River - Michael Danino

Marking the one time that actual history agreed with most WhatsApp forwards on the topic, Danino comes to the conclusion that Sarasvati was an actual river that flowed through the northern plains, and its drying up could have shaped our destiny in a profound way.

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Couldn’t get past the first few pages of The Buried Giant but this one was unputdownable.

“I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know - Joseph Romm

In the age of trump and similar bozos ascending everywhere to positions of civilizational influence, I wish I could somehow make this book compulsory for everyone.

Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent - Pranay Lal

This book traces the journey of the Indian tectonic plate from its separation from Gondwana to its current uncomfortable union with the European plate. Lal so intimately brings to life the history of this land that at various points while reading the book I wondered why we haven’t cordoned off the entire subcontinent and declared it one mega museum.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - Yuval Noah Harari

It may not count as a scholarly work, but I found Homo Deus to be incredibly though-provoking in so many of the disciplines it tackles.

Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

Wrote a more detailed post on this one.

The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

Last year I fell in love with Primo Levi and the romance continued in 2017. In The Periodic Table Levi combines his musings on science and otherwise in the most delectable manner.

“[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.”

Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth - Audrey Truschke

It’s not a coincidence that I’ve read so much Indian history these last two years when there has been such a broadside on historical facts. I almost feel like it’s every liberal’s duty to educate himself to counter the relentless rewriting of history that’s been happening in our country.

“In reality Aurangzeb pursued no overarching agenda vis-à-vis Hindus within his state. ‘Hindus’ of the day often did not even label themselves as such and rather prioritized a medley of regional, sectarian, and caste identities (for example, Rajput, Maratha, Brahmin, Vaishnava). As many scholars have pointed out, the word ‘Hindu’ is Persian, not Sanskrit, and only became commonly used self-referentially during British colonialism.”

Other books that I enjoyed:

The Siege: The Attack on the Taj - Adrian Levy, Cathy Scott-Clark

The Vegetarian - Han Kang

Heller's Tale: An Antarctic Novella - David Pablo Cohn

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

The Unfolding of Language - Guy Deutscher

...and the one that didn't make much of an impact.

Inner Engineering - A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Nicholas Stargardt's The German War

There's a scene in Roman Polanski's The Pianist in which the protagonist, Władysław Szpilman, gets discovered by a Nazi captain, Wilm Hosenfeld, in the ruins of a house in Warsaw in which the former is hiding. After a tense pause in which the viewer is left guessing about the outcome of that encounter the German officer decides to hide the pianist and later even starts to regularly bring him food. Hosenfeld's actions have a certain quality that you don't normally associate with heroism, sneakiness. I remember wondering about what drove him to take such enormous risks keeping the pianist alive through the war. Did he save other jews too? For someone with a conscience how conflicting was it to dispense his duties to such a monstrous regime? I've wondered what it would be like to get into the heads of everyday Germans as they waddled through a war that they had thrust upon the world.

Nicholas Stargardt's "The German War" tries to do that. Quoting letters and diaries written by ordinary Germans through the war, the book offers a glimpse of how everyday citizens interpreted the goings-on. It's easy to think of the second world war as an episode involving wily generals, scheming mad-men, marauding war machines, and ruthless strategies, but underneath it all were a billion little human dramas being played out. The letters chosen in the book provide fascinating answers to questions I have often chewed on. What did the ordinary Germans think about their role in the war? Or about the holocaust? What did the soldiers think about invading Poland? Or later, Russia? What did liberal Germans think about the racial discourse of the time? What was the church's role in all of it? Where were the conscientious objectors?

There are people of all shades who turn up in the book. There are a few who live in denial, continuing to believe till the end that Germany was the true victim, first of Versailles, then of "World Jewry and Bolshevism" and later of the Allies' attacks. There are those that are downright evil (Goebbel's diary is quoted liberally). There are other willing folks of varying degrees of complicity who approve of the conduct of their country. There are the mere pawns of a vile system who get driven into being hapless accomplices, or as Wiesenthal called them, "desk murderers". There are the supremely lucky ones, such as one Jewish man who manages to take on an Aryan identity through the entire duration of the war. And then there are the understated heroes like Hosenfeld. None of these stories make it easier to understand the war, though. Hosenfeld, the rare hero in a messed up time, for example, lands up in a Soviet PoW camp and dies a dishonorable death, probably during the course of torture by the "good" guys of the war. Reading this book was a strange experience. It made history seem richer. It didn't make the war seem any less absurd. It convinces me that civilization is such a thin veneer, waiting for the next perfect storm or the next great manipulator to peel it off.

Reading in 2015

Top picks for 2015 would be 

• This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein: COP-21 happened a few weeks after I finished reading this book, and it was truly depressing how far we are from really dealing with climate change with the urgency that it deserves. "History knocked on your door, did you answer?" asks one of the author's friends who appears in the book. The answer for our generation, and I'm as guilty as the next person, is a sad 'No'. 
• Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition - Nisid Hajari: When it comes to the Indo-pak partition, you can't really trust our history textbooks because the narratives are too busy trying to flatter our side of the story. I suspect that that's the case in Pakistan too. This books is refreshing in that its written by someone who is far enough removed to list down events without taking sides, but close enough that he feels for the subject.
• The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan: My obligatory WW-II indulgence. An earlier post about the book.  
• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - Michael Pollan: As someone who tries to optimize his eating patterns for both a smaller carbon footprint and better long-term health, the pop-sci literature can be confusing as hell. This book was of help. I loved the 7-word thumb-rule that Pollan offers "Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much". 
• Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy - Mihir Sharma: I almost gave up the book on account of its overly sardonic tone, but I'm glad I didn't. This book makes some good recommendations for an under-performing economy. Also reminds you of the opportunity that Manmohan Singh and PVN missed in 1991. 

Honorable mentions

• The Shell Collector - Anthony Doerr
• Aarushi - Avirook Sen
• Free at Last: The Sudbury Valley School - Daniel Greenberg
• What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions - Randall Munroe

These two were letdowns

• Go Set a Watchman - Harper Lee
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz

Volume-wise, I managed just about a book a month in 2015 and that was largely due to the books that I abandoned mid-way for various reasons. 

• The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie (Reading)
• Limits to Growth - Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (Reading)
• My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love (Reading)
• Alan Turing: The Enigma - Andrew Hodges (Reading)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

There are many things that keep bringing me back to movies and books on World War II. I find it fascinating how almost every country of note got sucked into the melee. It boggles the mind how fast the conflict escalated and it boggles even more how fast the wounds healed. To me the war is confirmation that this thing we call ‘civilization’ is but a thin veneer.

When I think about World War II the European and the pacific theaters come to mind. Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a reminder of just how far the conflict really spread and how many actors it forced in. Much of the story is set in Siam where the Japanese exploited thousands of Australian POWs to build a railway from Singapore to Burma (Think Bridge on the River Kwai). The protagonist is a surgeon in one such camp who becomes the leader of the POWs and is witness to the atrocities in the camps. Violence, both commissioned by the Japanese and that which is incidental. There’s one scene in which gangrene sets in an already amputated leg of a prisoner, and the doctor has to saw off the leg all the way to the hip in the grimiest of conditions. He struggles hard to suture an artery to stop the bleeding and at the end of a longish struggle finally manages it, only to realise that the patient has already died on the makeshift bamboo bed. I found those parts, where the violence is so banal, the most heartrending.

There’s a love story that runs in the background (or foreground, depends on who you ask) which I didn’t fancy much, but that’s mostly because I’ve lost the enzymes to digest romance in literature. The parts set in the war are truly gripping and soul-crushing. The best war literature gets into what it means to be human both as oppressor and as victim, and I thought this book scores really high there. There’s one passage where the doctor asks one of his compatriots “You still believe in God” and the inmate says “Dunno colonel, It’s human beings I’m starting to wonder about.”

Reading in 2014

Books that I strongly recommend

Sense of Style – Steven Pinker

Books on language usage remind me of Heraclitus’s quote “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” How do you make lasting rules on a subject that is as dynamic as language? I think Pinker comes closest to distinguishing good usage from snobbery. My prediction is that Sense of Style will replace Strunk and White as the definitive writing guide for English.

My Struggle – Karl Ove Knausgård

In contrast to my first recommendation, this one eschews style to the point of being boring. Here’s a quote from the book that seems to justify that point of view “…everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books.” I picked this book after a glowing endorsement in Marginal Revolution. Reading the book was a struggle, and at many points I felt like I was wasting my time. After I finished I felt relief and wondered how anybody could read another of those volumes – this is a six-part autobiographical novel, remember. So, why is this in my top recommendations for the year? I don’t think I have figured out a good reason but this passage in the book comes close to a possible answer “And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read but in the perception of myself while I was reading.” The descriptions of mundane events in this book are exactly what banalities look like and there’s a certain comfort in accepting them as such. No pursuits of profundity. No unearthing of non-existent layers. Whatever the reason, nothing so boring has been so compelling. Guess what book I’m reading right now? My Struggle – part two!

Honorable mentions

• A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson: Covers everything from the Big Bang to the contintental drift to extinction of the dinosaurs. 
• Waking up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris 
• The Competent Authority by Shovon Chowdhury – Surprisingly funny political satire.
• The Code Book by Simon Singh
• The Sceptical Patriot by Sidin Vadukut: Badly needed reality check in an environment of hyper-patriotism.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Theory of Relativity: Another failed attempt to understand Einstein’s theory.

And finally, these didn’t really make a lasting impression

• Lying by Sam Harris
• Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

Books that stuck

This was a list-tag thingy going on in facebook. Thought I'll copy that over here too, since this blog has seen a dry spell lately.

Selfish Gene: This belongs to the genre "You can never look at the world the same way again". Many other Dawkins's books left impressions of varying sizes on me, but I should mention "The Blind Watchmaker" and "God Delusion"

1984: Gloomy stories seem to stay longer with you than happy ones. Until it was cheapened to peddle a consumer product, this book was the best ad for democracy.

Old Man and the Sea: The power of good fiction to force empathy out of you. I distinctly remember feeling every bit of Santiago's exhaustion by the time he gets to the shore.

Tropic of Cancer: Whether a book stays with you also depends on at what stage in your life you encounter it. Tropic crossed my path when my own opinions were being formed on a variety of topics- censorship, free will, civilization- and made the kind of mark that none of the author's other books or even a re-reading of this one have made since.

Thinking, Fast and Slow: Had got me hooked on thinking about thinking. Immediately after this one, I binge-read Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" and Pinker's "How your mind works".

Slaughterhouse-Five: It's liable to change in the future, but at this moment, all things considered, Vonnegut is probably my favorite writer of fiction and Slaughterhouse-five is right at the top. Honorable mention: Cat's Cradle.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Like Anantha said, HGG is a genre on its own. What sane mind can come up with ideas like ballpoint planets, SEP fields, and an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "Belgium"?

Asterix series: Incomparable humor. I often wonder how special it must be in its original form in French.

Midnight's Children: I read this book in an 18-hr marathon, sitting in a teahouse in Leh. The setting and the book formed such a strong association that I can't think of one without remembering the other.

The Meadow: Hits home how inextricable the Kashmir situation really is through a masterful reporting of an unsolved kidnapping that happened in the valley years ago. A cloud of gloom hung over me for days after.

Carvalho (Poorna Chandra Tejaswi): The token diversity entry in this list. I'm closet-parochial about the Western Ghats, and no book I've read has quite captured that location with the same level of intimacy. And only my mother tongue seems to do that place justice.

Reading in 2013

I aim to read at the rate of at least one good book per month, and by that measure, 2013 was a satisfactory one.

Top tier recommendations

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined - Steven Pinker: Anthropology, history and ethics all come nicely together in this book, persuading you to accept a reality that seems counter-intuitive, especially when, while I was reading this, the details of the 2012 Delhi rape were just coming out. Eventually, the mass response to that incident did somewhat prove Pinker's hypothesis that we live in the most peaceful time ever.
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Daniel C. Dennett: The chapter on consciousness was such a delight. You realize even when demystified by Dennett's logical deconstruction, "consciousness" inspires awe.
The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod: "Axelrod's tournament" kept getting cited in several books I had read in the recent past, and I had to read this book to satisfy my curiosity. It's intriguing how a vanilla Tit-for-Tat strategy is the most effective one in an iterative prisoner's dilemma game. It's even more fascinating to think that beneath all our complex social behavior our firmware might be as simple as that - tit for tat! (although the author never makes that claim).
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace: A luxury cruise is a good setting for Wallace's dark social commentary. Really funny!
India After Gandhi - Ramachandra Guha: The freedom struggle, the characters in it, and the episodes around (like the Partition, and the Gandhi assassination), by the sheer momentousness probably dwarf all other succeeding events. Somehow, I grew up believing that history ended in the late 40s. Guha chronicles the events after independence. But it's the portraits of the people (Nehru, Patel, Rajaji, JP, Ambedkar etc.) that get the treatment they deserve, restoring them from the distortions dealt by the current popular narratives.
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie: I read this one immediately after India After Gandhi, and it felt like Rushdie borrowed the intricate sets that Guha erected to stage a magical opera of his own. Plus the fact that I read this book by a fire in a kitchen tent in Stok Kangri base camp during the 3 days I spent at 18k ft amsl waiting for the weather to let up made for an other-worldly experience.

Here are other books that I recommend
Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut: My yearly Vonnegut dose.
Satyagraha in South Africa - M.K. Gandhi: A glimpse of how MKG developed his philosophy and political strategies.
Ravan & Eddie - Kiran Nagarkar
D-Day - Anthony Beevor
The Emperor of Lies - Steve Sem-Sandberg
Why Does The World Exist? - Jim Holt: A nice accessible history of ontology and one of the few philosophy books I've read that didn't leave me feeling like an idiot.
Moonwalking with Einstein - Joshua Foer: For days after reading this book I was using the memory palace technique to memorize all sorts of stuff.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo
Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese: I probably would have never read this book if my friend hadn't left it back because she didn't want to lug it around for the rest of a backpacking trip she was embarking on. Loved the descriptions of Ethiopia in this one.

Reading in 2012

Here's my reading list from 2012. While I probably didn't match the volumes of previous years, I feel a greater percentage of the books I read this year made it to my tier recommendations.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman: Do you know those books that affect you in a way that you can never look at the world the same way again? This book was in that category.
• Foundation - Isaac Asimov: Now I know what the fuss about Asimov is all about.
• Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut: I've not had a list in the last three years that didn't feature Vonnegut.
• The Meadow - Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark: I already blogged about this one.
• The Longest Day - Cornelius Ryan: I'm not sure if it's the quality of the work or the momentousness of its subject - Normandy Landings - that elevates this book. We were driving through the Normandy coast visiting the beaches, coincidentally during the anniversary of the landings, while I was reading this book and that probably left a strong impression.
• The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach: I went from being an obsessive sports fan in my teens to one who came to view it as a big waste. This novel about a prodigal baseball player reminded me once again why sports viewing, in its chasing of the fleeting moments of magic and beauty, is so compelling. I almost forgave myself for all the wasted hours in front of the TV.
• Born to Run- Christopher McDougall: This one's a witty read even if you are not addicted to running.    Reading about ultra runners made my pursuits of middle distances and half marathons look trivial. Meanwhile it also articulated why it's ok to surrender to the highs of long distance running. I shaved 4 minutes off my 10km timing just days after finishing the book. 
• The Shining - Stephen King.

The second tier of recommendations

• Nudge - Richard Thaler
• Poor Economics - Abhijit Bannerjee and Esther Duflo
• American Pastoral - Philip Roth
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid
• Magic of Reality - Richard Dawkins
• My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse

There was only one book this year that I started but didn't finish: 'Change by Design' by Tim Brown. Another blog post on why I gave up on it.  

Book Recommendation: The Meadow

One of the joys of reading a work of fiction is when you finish the book, you experience a sensation of leaving a world behind. Especially in the case of a tragedy when you feel attached enough with the imaginary world that you feel a cloud of gloom hanging over your head but detached enough that you feel gratified from experiencing that world and at the same time have no problem getting on with real life. When the work is non-fiction, however, and it concerns a land that you've visited and an incident that you were old enough to remember vividly, the sadness won't be compartmentalized anymore.

The Meadow describes the events around the kidnapping of six foreign tourists from the Kashmir valley in 1995. Too many of us are taught to believe that Kashmir is a simplistic case of a neighbour trying to snatch what is rightfully ours. Somehow the whole place is filled with single dimensional innocent cutouts that are caught in a game played by politicians. And perhaps, the blacks and whites of that portrait just have to be inverted to see Pakistan's version. With its thorough research, this account digs deep into many of the characters, and perhaps, that's why left me feeling defeatist about whether it's possible to extricate ourselves out of the mess. Both the people of the valley and the officials who govern them are victims for the most part, but also can be perpetrators in measures that vary with circumstance. The role of the neighbour does not come as a surprise but what's most disappointing is the duplicity of my own country. Everything seems to be set up, on all sides, to win the tactical day-to-day battles even at the risk of dehumanizing everyone in the process. So forget about the border getting decided amicably any time soon. Forget about not worrying about bombs going off in our parliaments and in our trains. Forget about repatriating people who were chased out of their ancestral homes. This mess is here to stay for a while.

I wanted to also add that you should read the book for its extensive research and its effective prose, but, like I said, stepping back and appreciating the aesthetics of a narrative of something so upsetting is hard to do just yet.

The Art of Fielding

There are a gazillion movies based on the theme of an underdog sports team overcoming odds to make it big. Invariably tucked in that narrative is usually an errant protagonist who finds redemption at the very end. I'm a sucker for those plots when it comes to movies, but I never thought I'd fall for it in a book too until I read Chad Harbach's Art of Fielding.

The novel was gripping from start to finish, all along making me reflect on my own sports obsessions. Here's my background; I went from being a sports fanatic who followed Cricket, NBA, Formula 1, EPL and everything in between to one who almost watched no sport in a very short time. I remember I had already tipped over to this conclusion even before I read this bit in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent " sports -- that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view... it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance... keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about." Anyway, I was cured of all sports addiction except the one called Test Cricket. I've wondered often why that one has been so hard to shake off and this little text from Art of Fielding sums up why sports-viewing can be so compelling "The Human Condition being basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty,can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not." While I know nothing of baseball, I could relate several pieces of the book to my own joy of watching cricket. In some oblique way I could also relate it to the travails of three fading stars in our own cricket team; Dravid who seems to have lost his sense of timing, as much in his shot-making as in his retirement planning, Laxman, whose insistence on sticking to his place has finally made it legal to use "unaesthetic" and "Laxman" in the same sentence, and that genius called Tendulkar, who seems to be selling his soul in the pursuit of some arbitrary numbers. I'm not sure if these protagonists will find their redemption and finish on a high, but right now they are effectively de-addicting me from test cricket.

Reading in 2011

Here's the roundup of books I read in 2011. First the books that I would strongly recommend. "Brief Interviews..." has the most number of laugh-out-loud moments of any book I've read in recent memory. Cat's Cradle, even making allowance for the fact that I'm a Vonnegut groupie, is a must-read. Sirens of Titan, I thought, is among his most under-rated works. If you are a fan of Douglas Adams you'll enjoy the obvious inspirations for HHGG. If you are remotely interested in healthcare or medicine, you'll enjoy both the non-fiction recommendations at the bottom of this list.

• Brief Interviews With Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
• The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
• Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
• Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
• The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Here are the second tier of recommendations 

• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
• The Price of Civilization - Jeffrey Sachs
• The Great Stagnation - Tyler Cowen
• A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
• The Woman who Walked into Doors - Roddy Doyle
• How Much Should a Person Consume? - Ramachandra Guha
• Gandhi the Man - Eknath Easwaran

While last year I deliberately went out of my normal picks to try some science fiction, this year I read my first graphic novel.

• Batman - The Long Halloween

Then there were books that make too much of an impression

• The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa
• From Yeravda Mandir - M.K. Gandhi

And finally, the books that I, for various reasons, just couldn't finish

• The Innovator's Prescription - Clayton M. Christensen
• The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker
• The First and Last Freedom - J.Krishnamurti
• The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century - Tom Bower

Reading in 2010

I had a fairly satisfactory year in terms of my reading list last year, especially when compared to the year before that. Here's a roundup:
First up are the books that I strongly recommend - books that I probably will re-read at some point.

• Sceptical Essays - Bertrand Russell
• Listening to Grasshoppers: Fieldnotes on Democracy - Arundhati Roy
• Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
• The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
• The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory - Jorge Luis Borges

Here's the  second tier of recommendations

• Lessons in Journalism - T.J.S. George
• Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King
• Superfreakonomics - Dubner & Levitt
• Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
• The Future of Life - Edward O. Wilson    
• Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
• The True Believer - Eric Hoffer
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• Shah of Shahs - Ryszard_Kapuściński

This year I made a concerted effort to improve my knowledge of economics, which I may add, is still close to zilch. Here are the books I read in that endeavour.

• The Economic Consequences of the Peace - John Maynard Keynes (Didn't complete)
• How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy - Raghuram G. Rajan
• The Cartoon Introduction to Economics - Yoram Bauman & Grady Klein

I was made to read a couple of books as part of a course in office

• The Long Tail - Chris Anderson
• Happiness at Work - Srikumar Rao

Some books hardly left an impression

• Private Lives of Trees - Alejandro Zambra
• The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson

And finally, I just didn't manage to finish these books, for various reasons.

• The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The arrogant tone of the author was irritating)
• Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace (I was proceeding too slow) 
• Ishmael - Daniel Quinn (Lost my book!)

Reading in 2009

There was a time when I read like there's no tomorrow. "Reading" wasn't just a hobby, it was an absolute life-necessity. To not read was to admit a failing. When I met people I registered life-long prejudices against them depending on whether they read the "right" kind of books, the wrong kind or not at all. I got along great with other readers because after all there are so many things to talk about; Ulysses is so pretentious, you don't get the same satisfaction reading on an electronic device, oh I have a huge library, here's my top 5 favorite books ever, that guy there is a Dan Brown lemming and so on.

So I continued to claim to be a reader, sometimes added that hatefully overused adjective "voracious". I brandished it around like a badge every chance I got, in small talk in parties, Web 2.0 profiles, resumes, everywhere! This year I decided to put my religion to the test and kept a log of everything I read. And here's what I managed to do in an entire year!

* The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Reading)
* The Leadership Challenge (Didn't complete)
* How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker
* Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
* Chomsky Reader (Didn't complete)
* The Comfort of Things (Didn't complete)
* The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
* Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
* Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
* Plan B - Lester Brown
* Red Queen - Matt Ridley

Seven complete books in 365 days! Time to find me a new cult.

Reading Lolita

I'm not going to write about Lolita, the novel. I'm going to write about the experience of reading Lolita.

Every page is a celebration. Yet, every paragraph is a hellish ethical ride. The prose is sublime, yet to acknowledge it feels like connivance in the narrator's outrages. In the first part of the book, when the narrator Humbert's thoughts are just that, it was easy to humour him. After all, you can't be too intolerant towards mere thoughtcrime. I can remember all the times in my life when I've had to conquer the thoughts that I couldn't help have. As the dude said, "If my thoughtdreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine". As long as the narrator only describes his thoughts I was an unqualified admirer of the grand prose that does so much justice to the madness of love, all the while making a grudging allowance for the depravity. In the middle of the book it got terribly confrontational. I couldn't laugh freely at the delightful humor. I couldn't laud the expression. I couldn't be unabashed about anything I liked about the narrative. Every bit of appreciation made me wonder if I was a partner in crime.

The place where I do most of my reading is in my office shuttle. Normally, I look forward to people peeping into my book and starting a conversation about it. While I was reading Lolita, however, I often curled the pages so that my neighbour had no chance of reading any full sentence. What if they thought I approved? What if they've not heard that Lolita is a classic? There was even a time when I folded the book in a hurry and put it in my bag because I suspected that the guy sitting next to me was reading it. There never is a boring moment while reading the book. The irony and the candor spawned off so much introspection around morals, censorship, love and the whole experience of being human. It was one of the most stimulating books I've read... And now I'm nervous that the reader will misconstrue the meaning of that last sentence. Ah well! That sums up the ethical tiptoeing that Lolita forces you to do!