Books I read in 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
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
