Books I read in 2021

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