Books I read in 2021…

SB
2 min readJan 26, 2021

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A compilation of books I read and audiobooks I listened to in 2021

Here are my other reading lists from 2022, 2020 and 2016–2019. I have also written on how I go about finding books to read.

2022 onwards, I started maintaining a more flexible database of “impactful content” I encountered across books, articles, podcasts etc.

I am a picky reader and tend to enjoy most books I read. The ones I highly recommend are noted in in bold.

Books

  1. Small Days and Nights, Tishani Doshi
  2. Mexican Gothic, Silvia Garcia-Moreno
  3. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan
  4. Caste, Isabel Wilkerson
  5. The Sound of a Snail Eating, Elizabeth Tova Bailey
  6. There There, Tommy Orange
  7. Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen
  8. Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
  9. Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Letham
  10. Exhalation, Ted Chiang (including Lifecycle of Software Objects)
  11. How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, Witold Rybczynski
  12. Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
  13. The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel
  14. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  15. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
  16. Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, Suzy Hansen
  17. This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
  18. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
  19. Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi, Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose (graphic novel)
  20. Hungry Ghosts, Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose (graphic novel)
  21. Get Jiro!, Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose (graphic novel)
  22. The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
  23. In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
  24. Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
  25. The Overstory, Richard Powers
  26. The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green
  27. Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte
  28. Severance, Ling Ma
  29. Midnights Border, Suchitra Vijayan
  30. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
  31. Normal People, Sally Rooney
  32. The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu
  33. Darkness Visible, William Styron

Audiobooks

  1. A Burning, Megha Majumdar
  2. Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack
  3. The Power Broker (Vol 1), Robert Caro
  4. The Power Broker (Vol 2), Robert Caro
  5. The Precipice, Toby Ord
  6. The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer
  7. Conscious, Annaka Harris
  8. It’s What I Do, Lynsey Addario
  9. Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
  10. 10% Happier, Dan Harris
  11. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  12. The Power Broker (Vol 3), Robert Caro
  13. Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, Tim Hwang
  14. Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
  15. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, Andrea Wulf

In progress:

  1. Caste Matters, Suraj Yengde
  2. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
  3. When Crime Pays, Milan Vaishnav
  4. Photography and Belief, David Levi Strauss
  5. Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, Sunil Amrith
  6. Human Acts, Han Kang
  7. Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte
Photo by Ren Ran on Unsplash

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