A compilation of books I read and audiobooks I listened to (so far) in 2021
Here are my past reading lists from 2020 and 2016–2019. I have also written on how I go about finding books to read.
I am a picky reader and tend to enjoy most books I…
This year, as college and the era of required reading ended, I decided to start being more mindful of my casual reading habits.
I have been writing short reviews of most of the books I read, linked in-line with the book entry.
I had to combine the reviews for these two books because 1. I read one and listened to the other concurrently, and 2. their power only multiplied in combination. The two books examine inequality in elite colleges in America at two different stages — the admissions process and actual campus…
I dragged my feet on reading Becoming because I assumed that it would be like any other celebrity memoir — hackneyed writing in big font with many cliches and platitudes, written to sell to a large audience of already committed fans. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was…
This book left me with a lot of thoughts. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is complex and I had to listen to the 24 hour audiobook at basically 1–1.2x speed (I usually listen to books at 2x) which meant it took me nearly four weeks to get through it all.
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The Buddha in the Attic is a unique book — there is no single perspective or central cast of characters. Instead, we get to experience the lives of Japanese mail-order brides from their ship voyages to America till the second World War and their experiences of internment. The prose is…
Daily Rituals is an interesting book that outlines the daily routines of people who are famous for their creative work. …
Wuhan Diary is a collection of blog posts written by Chinese author Fang Fang, over the course of 60 days of Wuhan’s citywide quarantine starting January 25, 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The blog posts were originally written in Chinese and shared on social media platforms…
Having spent the better part of the last four years neck-deep in statistics, I didn’t expect learn much new material from this book but I was pleasantly surprised. In The Art of Statistics. Spiegelhalter covers all the topics you would expect to see in an introductory statistics lecture, but without…
I am a big fan of Ezra Klein’s podcast and listening to Why We Are Polarized in the audiobook format made the book feel like a 7-hour long podcast episode.
In the book, Klein provides a detailed history of polarization in American politics, focussing on changes taking place during the…
