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.
Between 2016 and 2019, I aimed to read 36 books per year. You can find my reading list here, and here for 2021.
Over the years a lot of people have asked me how I find books to read, how to get (re)started with reading, and gain momentum. I made a post covering my thought process.
I am also trying to slowly read my way around the world and reduce the dominance of books set in U.S., U.K., and India in my reading list. Here is where I stand right now.
- The Great Smog of India, Siddharth Singh
- Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer, Sunil Gupta & Sunetra Chaudhary (Review)
- Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil (Review)
- Milkman, Anna Burns (Review)
- Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi
- Ants Among Elephants, Sujatha Gidla (Review)
- A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro (Review)
- [COVID-19 Escapism Read] Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling
- [COVID-19 Escapism Read] Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
- Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu, Review)
- How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell (Review, Reading list)
- Billion Dollar Whale, Tom Wright & Bradley Hope (Review)
- Evicted, Matthew Desmond (Review)
- Give People Money, Annie Lowrey (Review)
- After Dark, Haruki Murakami (Review)
- Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng (Review)
- Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (graphic novel)
- Lake, Banana Yoshimoto (Review)
- A.I. Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Kai Fu Lee (Review)
- Capital, Thomas Piketty (Review)
- Billionaire Raj, James Crabtree (Review)
- Goldfinch, Donna Tartt (Review)
- The Free Voice: On Democracy, Culture and the Nation, Ravish Kumar (Review)
- Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee (Review)
- Are Prisons Obsolete, Angela Davis (Review)
- Wuhan Diary, Fang Fang (Review)
- The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data, David Spiegelhalter (Review)
- Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka (Review)
- Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, David Enrich (Review)
- What If?, Randall Munroe (Review)
- Free Food for Millionaires, Min Jin Lee (Review)
- Daily Rituals, Mason Currey (Review)
- The Perfect Nanny, Leila Slimani (Review)
- Dear Ijeawele; or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbagh
- Becoming, Michelle Obama (Review)
- Origin, Dan Brown (Review)
- Less, Andrew Sean Greer (Review)
- Secret History, Donna Tartt (Review)
- Maid, Stephanie Land (Review)
- Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert MacFarlane
- Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity, Larissa MacFarquhar
- Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Angela Nagle (Review)
- Poor Economics, Esther Duflo & Abhijit Banerjee (Review)
- The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, Thant Myint-U (Review)
- The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden (Review)
- An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green (Review)
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr (Review)
- Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (Review)
- Shadow Armies: Fringe Organizations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva, Dhirendra K. Jha (Review)
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
- Six Four, Hideo Yokoyama (Review)
- A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (Review)
- Minor Feelings, Cathy Hong
- Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng (Review)
- One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul (Review)
- Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, Rutger Bregman (Review)
- Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin D. West (Review)
- A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles (Review)
Audiobooks
- Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (Review)
- I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, Ed Yong (Review)
- Permanent Record, Edward Snowden (Review)
- Why We Are Polarized, Ezra Klein (Review)
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff (Review)
- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli
- The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen (Review)
- Behave, Robert Sapolsky (Review)
- Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell, Alexandra Horowitz (Review)
- Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham (Review)
- Life 3.0, Mark Tegmark
- Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
- The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, Anthony Abraham Jack (Review)
- Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, Alexandra Horowitz (Review)
- The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
- The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, John Barry (Review)
- Hunger, Roxane Gay (Review)
- Gratitude, Oliver Sacks (Review)
- The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein (Review)
- The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells (Review)
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
- In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan (Review)
- The Man Who Solved the Market, Gregory Zuckerman (Review)
In progress / on the reading list
- The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell
- Darkness Visible, William Styron
- The Tsar of Love and Techno, Anthony Marra
- Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino
- When Crime Pays, Milan Vaishnav
- The Great Glass Sea, John Weil
- Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
- Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, Jan Gehl
- Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
- The South Side, Natalie Moore
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
- Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Adichie
- The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction, Goldwaithe et al *
