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
- Small Days and Nights, Tishani Doshi
- Mexican Gothic, Silvia Garcia-Moreno
- The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan
- Caste, Isabel Wilkerson
- The Sound of a Snail Eating, Elizabeth Tova Bailey
- There There, Tommy Orange
- Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen
- Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
- Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Letham
- Exhalation, Ted Chiang (including Lifecycle of Software Objects)
- How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, Witold Rybczynski
- Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
- The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel
- On the Road, Jack Kerouac
- The Quiet American, Graham Greene
- Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, Suzy Hansen
- This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
- A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
- Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi, Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose (graphic novel)
- Hungry Ghosts, Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose (graphic novel)
- Get Jiro!, Anthony Bourdain & Joel Rose (graphic novel)
- The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
- In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
- Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
- The Overstory, Richard Powers
- The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green
- Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte
- Severance, Ling Ma
- Midnights Border, Suchitra Vijayan
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
- Normal People, Sally Rooney
- The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu
- Darkness Visible, William Styron
Audiobooks
- A Burning, Megha Majumdar
- Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack
- The Power Broker (Vol 1), Robert Caro
- The Power Broker (Vol 2), Robert Caro
- The Precipice, Toby Ord
- The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer
- Conscious, Annaka Harris
- It’s What I Do, Lynsey Addario
- Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
- 10% Happier, Dan Harris
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- The Power Broker (Vol 3), Robert Caro
- Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, Tim Hwang
- Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
- The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, Andrea Wulf
In progress:
- Caste Matters, Suraj Yengde
- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
- When Crime Pays, Milan Vaishnav
- Photography and Belief, David Levi Strauss
- Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, Sunil Amrith
- Human Acts, Han Kang
- Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte
