Books I read in 2024
...and two years of Chai Masala
Happiest of new years dear reader! I am still around, though barely. These weeks I have been trying to stay afloat as the years steadily pass me by and internalize that I can’t feasibly do all the things and read all the books I had once hoped to. I know there is peace to be found in this realization. I hope it comes to me in 2025.
2024 had its ups and downs. I was able to travel to places I had hoped to visit for a long time and really immerse myself in some of them (shoutout to Jakarta). Despite often agonizing over the point of grad school, I’ve become better at intuiting incentives and power structures in the places I have found myself. This lends itself to both tremendous hope (diagnosis is the first step to solution) and deep nihilism (the root causes are intractable), but in 2025 I hope to become more skillful at managing my motivation and cultivating my optimism.
I didn’t write much here but I did put other thoughts out in the world, on extreme heat in India, caste and the US elections, business school musings on the case method, and a case for dynamism in the non-profit sector. I had hoped to write more and am still nursing more ideas than I have time to nurture, but that’s what new years resolutions are for.
As always, the reviews below are stream of consciousness and directional. This time I have also added a section on people, themes, and topics I hope to learn more about in 2025! Please email me back if you have any thoughts, recommendations or questions, especially if we haven’t talked in a while :)
Books I read in 2024
Also see: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020
In roughly chronological order. Highly recommended books are starred ⭐️.
Animal Liberation Now, Peter Singer: This book is part of the modern animal welfare canon. I got to it very late in my own journey of animal welfare. As a result I had already imbibed a lot of its arguments on the suffering of non-human animals and scale of factory farming in the West and didn’t see my world turn upside down. However, if you find yourself thinking “what is this whole veganism thing about,” I strongly recommend starting here.
Indigo: Collected Short Stories, Satyajit Ray
⭐️ Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges: I wish I spent 6 months reading these stories because each one had so much to savour. Like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, much of the story is in the reader’s mind, not on the page.
Parliamental, Meghnad S
⭐️ Sita’s Liberation, Volga: I have long been obsessed with retellings of Sita’s story from the Ramayana, which to me has effectively rendered the story a tragedy. The rendition of the Ramayana I was told as a kid conveniently ended with Diwali and the return to Ayodhya. The ‘epilogue’, which covers Sita’s tragic life of accusations and exile, is rarely addressed. In this short novela, Volga depicts interactions between Sita and the women of Ramayana from a feminist perspective. I particularly appreciated the chapter on Surpanakha, which shares her perspective as a victim of harassment by the brothers, not an evil demonness. (I have also been thinking about Ramayana’s ethnic allusions about Raavan and Lanka. Recommendations welcome!) (Also see Ishita’s much more thoughtful review that resonated deeply with me.)
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, Frans de Waal [audiobook]
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks [audiobook]
The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India, Mansi Choksi: In the vein of The Ferment and Dreamers, a deeply reported book following couples who go beyond the confines of arranged marriage to seek ‘forbidden loves’ across caste, religion, and gender.
⭐️ Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kar: I read this book in preparation for a school trip to Kinshasa, DRC and was in turns stunned and gutted. Kar has done extraordinary journalism to uncover the supply chains that turn cobalt mined with modern day slave labor into our smartphones. He travels into the depths of Lumumbashi (which I was not able to visit) to report on labor conditions that seem fit for the 18th century, Chinese / US conglomerates, and the political instability surrounding the most resource rich region of the world. Mandatory reading for anyone with a digital device today.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, Jason Stearns: A longer history of DRC, starting from independence to the most recent coups. In a foreshadowing to Jakarta Method (#15), it made me reckon with US foreign interference which culminated in the killing of Patrick Lumumba and likely cemented decades of instability in the country.
⭐️ Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: Sad it took me this long to read, but was especially powerful after having seen the Congo in real life.
Centre, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi: Very funky, dark but fun and easy read for a break from heavy real-world stuff.
H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, Kunal Purohit: Traces the rise of Hindu nationalist social media influencers and YouTube stars. A well-researched peek into a world I was blissfully ignorant of.
⭐️ The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, Joshua Cohen: When I think of historical fiction, it typically conjures large, sweeping narratives set over expanses of time and place. This piece of historical fiction is exactly the opposite and refreshingly so. I can’t say the book radically grew my mind, but reading each gloriously crafted sentence was a joy.
⭐️ The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins: I read this at the start of a two-month stint in Jakarta, making the book all the more impactful. Bevins travels far and wide to trace the history of CIA-supported anti-communist pogroms, with a focus on the Indonesian mass killings of 1965 where an estimated 0.5-1 million people were killed. This history is little known within Indonesia itself — the Suharto administration that came to power after successfully buried it and present-day elites have continued doing so. Bevins interviews the last surviving witnesses and perpetrators of these crimes, some of whom were surprising cavalier. Also strikingly it covers US’ complicity (intelligence, army training) in its bid to remove communism from the ‘third world’. The book helped shake me out of the callousness of assuming I ‘knew’ the most significant events of modern history. That such a genocide occurred less than 60 years ago, supported by the ‘oldest democracy’ of the world, and I still didn’t know about it did a lot to reinstill intellectual humility. I hope it does for you too.
[Skimmed] The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite, Duff MacDonald: I recommend reading the introduction, conclusion, and the chapters that interest you. MacDonald has written a deeply researched institutional biography that is at once a searing critique of HBS. However, too often it delves into deep history that did not feel particularly engaging to me, even after going there.
⭐️ The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler: I love reading old books that seem like they were written for today. Strongly recommend.
[Skimmed] Debt, David Graeber: Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs influenced me strongly through much of my early 20s, when I had a proverbial bullshit job. As a newly minted business school student I was excited to read this book but ultimately floundered through it as it proved to be way too academically anthropological for my tastes. The latter chapters on sovereign debt are perhaps most interesting.
⭐️ The Echo Maker, Richard Powers: Like most of us, The Overstory was my gateway to Richard Powers. I have slowly been making my way through his other work and am most of all impressed by how prolific he is given the depth of research and character building in his novels. This book is about a man with Capgras Syndrome (where one believes their close relations are ‘imposters’) and the toll it takes on his sister who attempts to be his caregiver. It is also about a whole lot more, I recommend you pick it up.
Aswan, December 2024 Indonesia Etc., Elizabeth Pisani: A travelogue about Pisani’s travels through all of Indonesia’s major islands. In many ways this book is par for course for the genre, but I did appreciate the overview it gave me of the country.
⭐️ The Arsonist's City, Hala Alyan: I read this book in a handful of sittings. An excellent multigenerational family drama covering messy questions of love, identity, and secret histories. Also beautifully written, as evidenced by Alyan’s NYTimes op-eds.
⭐️ City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh, Zeyaad Masroor Khan: I hope to see more memoirs of this variety and fewer Shashi Tharoor monographs or Modi hagiographies. Khan narrates the history of his family growing up in a historic Muslim neighborhood of Aligarh. The story is rich with details about nuances in social hierarchies, customs, and traditions and taught me a lot. Strongly recommend.
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal: Lovely book about a senior womens’ literacy club that turns into a whole lot more. I appreciated how it navigated the nuances of life in insulated immigrant communities.
⭐️ Accelerating India's Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance, Karthik Muralidharan: I am sure if you were to pitch me a book covering all of Indian development research in the last three decades, I’d scoff and say its impossible. Muralidharan has audaciously taken on this task and executed it remarkably well. Analagous to Piketty’s tomes, the book is imminently readable but sometimes a slog. But so is development and I recommend powering through.
Sitayana, Amit Majumdar: Continuing in the vein of Sita stories as #5 above.
⭐️ Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo: I read this in one sitting on a flight to London. It helped me think about ‘non-traditional’ family structures and what it takes to build our lives intentionally.
⭐️ Working, Robert Caro: I was in a writing rut and needed inspiration. This book delivered :) If you have read The Power Broker, I strongly recommend this (and its 10% as long)
Fleishman is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner
⭐️ Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky: This is a 600 page book about spiders. If you are still reading, I can’t recommend it enough. I’ve often wondered what the world would’ve looked like if an animal other than humans / chimpanzees had built modern civilization. Tchaikovsky explores precisely that question in this book and the next two in the trilogy, which are about octopi and crows. I won’t spoil the plot but the story traverses centuries and is rich with human-spider interaction (though not of the kinds you’d expect). This book grew my mind.
⭐️ The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker: This is a 200 page book about a dream featuring John Maynard Keynes. If you are still reading, I can’t recommend it enough. I was drawn to this book because a review noted “Martin Riker's novel dissects how people live with their ideas, particularly when the world tells them those ideas are misguided.” The book is a stream of consciousness retelling of a professor’s dream / thoughts on a sleepless night before she is scheduled to deliver a lecture on Keynes. The novel particularly delves into Keynes’ moral philosophy, trying to understand the man who wrote Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Highly recommend.
How to be Both, Ali Smith: I am sure had I read this book with more patience and attention I would have loved it. Unfortunately in my current circumstances, I didn’t.
⭐️ The Immortal King Rao, Varuni Vara: At once rich historical fiction and dystopian science fiction, unique in its consideration of caste vs other diaspora fiction. I picked this book up in Portland and was surprised it hadn’t come across my radar earlier. It traces the journey of a Dalit boy to the US, to the helm of a tech behemoth, and finally into world domination and insanity. It considers technoutopianism and surveillance capitalism gone too far — a timely read.
Tokyo Express, Seichō Matsumoto: Quick and enjoyable murder mystery, in the vein of Keigo Higashino and Hideo Yokoyama.
⭐️ Thinking in Systems, Daniella Meadows: A semester of business school cases has left me reeling with the local optimization / short sightedness of mainstream corporate culture. I was reintroduced to Daniella Meadows through the departure letter of a student who chose to drop out of HBS, in part due to the reasons above. The book is an excellent primer to systems thinking, though at times I felt it was just giving me a new vocabulary for issues I had considered in different guises before. Meadows is also a wonderful writing, who manages to make poetic even the driest of diagrams. Strongly recommend.
Private Equity: A Memoir, Carrie Sun: I had high hopes from this book -- the author dropped out of the same joint degree program as I am in (albeit at Penn), harboured dreams of being a writer but found herself stuck in PE. What’s not to like? Instead I got pages on pages of detailed accounts about her boss with the occasional trauma porn thrown in. I was hoping for structural critiques and deep reflection. Instead I got a memoir that reads like a journal (and also didn’t really provide any surprising insight into corporate America).
[audiobook] Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way, Nate Soares: This is a highly EA-pilled book, and probably not for everyone. It focuses on replacing guilt-based motivation with more positive and sustainable forms of motivation. While I appreciated the depth and structure of the book, I sometimes felt a little lost in terminology / couldn’t keep up with the nuances of Soares’ reasoning. Probably worth a skim if you too feel debilitated by guilt, which then prevents you from achieving your goals.
Things I hope to read about in 2025
Manmohan Singh and Jimmy Carter’s deaths have got me thinking about (often quiet) leaders who brought about transformational change (obviously acknowledging that most will have complicated legacies). I started reading Half-Lion on Narasimha Rao last year and hope to finish it soon. I will also be seeking out biographies of FDR, Lyndon Johnson, John Maynard Keynes, Rachel Carson and anyone else you recommend me :)
I visited Egypt this year and for the first time internalized what “ancient civilization” means. I am still in awe of how roughly 3,000 years of continuity can be maintained, and also more skeptical of the future of our current civilizational paradigm. I unfortunately find standard ancient history that relays facts about artefacts and customs without context quite boring. I would love to read about the power structures and institutions in ancient and medieval societies, and find lessons for ours today.
Growing up in the 21st century, where the internet made the diffusion of ideas instantaneous, has left me with an unrealistic expectation of how quickly ideas should be implemented and values should change. I want to read more about the adoption of infrastructures and hard technologies and what it takes to bring about values change. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is on my list.
And if you got this far, I will leave you with an Easter egg. Here are some reading lists I like to reference when I am in a rut.
Caste Abolitionist Reads, compiled by Equality Labs
this year's list feels a lot more serious than years prior, and i'm also much less familiar with the books. have added the immortal king rao and children of time to my list.