Books Read in 2018. 55 books. 55 Reviews

1) Batman: The New 52 - Jack Snyder. Personally I miss the brooding realism of Batman’s previous iteration but parts of this series really hit the spot, none more so than the brooding horror of Night of the Owls

2) Men Without Women - Haruki Murakami. While I did love this book, it has to be seen for what a is, a bit of a sampler, packing all of Murakami’s whimsy in bittersweet mood pieces. It doesn’t have the immersive power of his novels, nor the emotional power of the great short story writers like Alice Munro. What it contains is beautiful short portraits of solitary men, examining the minutiae of the lives, emotions and journeys in a way that makes you feel like they were strangers you spent an evening talking to in a smoky bar in Tokyo

3) The Magus - John Fowles. A puzzle. A thriller. A detective novel. A philosophical piece on the nature of love, beyond possession and ownership and into acceptance of both the self and the other. The Magus is one of those rare books that wears its intelligence lightly, where the author doesn’t flaunt his learning in pretentious digressions, but uses it to move along plot, setting and character.

4) A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway. Like all of Hemingway’s book this one inspires me to write while demotivating me and making my writing feel hopelessly inadequate, cursed by adjectives and excessive description. The book itself is classic Hemingway, written with clarity, honesty and feeling, with sentences that feel like a punch in the gut if a punch in the gut could feel beautiful, and a sense of time and place that feels lost forever but familiar and eternal. A book that seems like a series of gossipy vignettes but is actually about the nature of art, creativity, friendship, loss, nostalgia, love and most of all writing

5) The Ice Storm - Rick Moody. A savage, biting, brilliantly funny, brutally poignant look at the dark underbelly of the 70s American dream. It addresses big themes like marriage, family, emasculation, adolescence, infidelity, identity and more while keeping the plot running like a crisply written satirical comedy.

6) Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders. The idea of voices from the grave has been done before and better a century ago in Pedro Paramo, the original masterpiece of Latin American literature. However this is a beautiful book in its own right, melancholy and philosophical, funny and moving. You feel Lincoln’s pain as a father as he struggles between duty and personal struggle, almost echoing the central theme of the Bhagavadgita. At the same time you’re forced to question the nature of death and its meaning, what it is to hold on, and what lies beyond the grave while never being preachy or heavy. This book moves you with its sensitivity and depth despite being written with the lightest of touches.

7) Small Giants : Companies that Chose to be Great instead of Big - Bo Burlingham. This is the first business book I’ve read that really felt relevant to me, to my choices and my situation. As I grappled with the idea of what was best for KWAN as we grow, this book taught me a lot while also validating a lot of my choices and reassuring me about them. In a world where business books talk about Tesla and Apple and GE and IBM, its good to read a book about businesses that are more relevant to most of us. 

8) When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead : Useful Stories From a Persuasive Man - Jerry Weintraub with Rich Cohen. Great anecdotes from one of the legends in the business

9) Battles in the Mind : Conquering and Winning Over Emotional Pain - Anna Chandy. Incredibly brave and honest memoir by one of the people I respect the most in my life. A must read for everyone trying to find happiness, to live a life of honesty, unburdened by the expectations or by the past

10 and 11) Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass - Isak Dinesen. Beautiful, elegiac ode to Africa. While the romanticising of the white colonial experience may jar in today’s times this is a book that needs to be read in the context in which it was written to appreciate its great beauty. It’s the rare colonial book that treats Africa with such love and respect, that describes the native Africans with so much dignity and humanity. You feel the author’s pain and despair at leaving this country and continent that she loves with all her soul, and the words for all their beauty don’t seem to do justice to the depth and intensity of her feeling. It feels almost as though you’re reading an additional layer of pure emotion, a cry from the depths of her soul that goes beyond her words and her extraordinary writing. This really is one of the most beautifully written non fiction books I’ve ever read.

12) Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges. I have never ever felt as stupid while reading a book, not even when I read Infinite Jest. Trying to make sense of Borges’ stories and essays on time and infinity, on space and perception, on history real and imagined stripped me of all delusions of intellectualism. I don’t have an issue with the absence of any major structure or plot in a story, in a purely sensory experience of words and ideas. But to appreciate it I need to understand what the author is saying, and for vast chunks of this Labyrinth I was hopelessly, completely lost

13) Tribe of Mentors - Tim Ferriss. Excellent companion piece to Tools of Titans, full of advice from the best and the brightest on the questions that we all face in our careers

14) Wonder - R J Palacio. The movie filled my heart with happiness and the book just reinforced that feeling

15) Life and Work Principles - Ray Dalio. A plus for insight. C for writing quality. Very very repetitive writing style. 45 pages of insight repeated across 500 pages.

16) The Real Madrid Way : How Values Created the Most Successful Sports Team on the Planet - Steven N Mandis. Great insight on how Real Madrid created the greatest sports team in the planet by institutionalising a set of values based on mentality rather than a style of play. 

17) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov. Disturbing and brilliantly written. While it’s not a story about illicit love, I felt it was also not a story about evil or morality, about a monster and his victim. It read like a different kind of love story, where the subject is America herself. This book was like a lyrical ode to America with all of its contradictions, a messed up precursor to On The Road, a journey across the soul of America.

18) The Meadow - Adrian Leavy and Cathy Scott-Clark. Spine chilling and shocking, it’s a reminder that Kashmir is far more complex than the media makes it out to be. It’s a war, a dirty one, with no good guys on any side including the Indian army or the militants. All citizens like to believe that their nation is on the right side of morality and history, but the truth is war brings out the worst and most cynical and evil on all sides

19) The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing. A harrowing story about Family and the idea of “normality”. A book that starts out as a horror story that takes off on the old myth of the changeling but ends with us questioning whether it is the child that is evil or society’s ideas about fitting it and conformism.

20) Conversation in the Cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa. A masterpiece. Like in Llosa’s other two masterpieces (The Feast of the Goat and The Time of the Hero), he interweaves the political and the personal, through multiple perspectives, narrators, stories, across different time structures. He destroys our ideas of beginning and middle and end and still tells a story that moves forward as a narrative building to a powerful crescendo, and tells a tale about a country, about hope, about growing up, about youth and idealism and disillusionment, about family and imperfection, about greed and violence and power, about life and a continent. Your reading is incomplete if you’ve not read Llosa’s three masterpieces. 

21) Killing Pablo : The Hunt for the Richest, Most Powerful Criminal in History. As a Narcos fan, this book by the author of Black Hawk Down is a compelling look at the details behind the hunt for Escobar. It takes the characters we know so well from Colonel Martinez to Javier Pena and tells you the real story of the hunt for Escobar. Reality really can be crazier than fiction. 

22) Half Lion : How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India - Vinay Sitapati. Much overdue biography on possibly the most consequential Indian leader since Gandhi, a man who set in motion changes that are transforming the lives of a billion people. 

23) The Art of the Good Life - Rolf Dobelli. A decent enough companion piece to The Art of Thinking Clearly but it repeats a large chunk of advice. It’s particularly unilluminating if you’ve read anything by Daniel Kahneman. 

24) If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino. The sheer joy of reading a truly original work, a work of creative genius and invention like no other book you’ve ever read. This is a jigsaw puzzle of a book, structurally the most inventive book I’ve read since My Name is Red. Because it doesn’t really follow any one story or engage deeply with any one character it does lack in emotional depth but it more than makes up for it in creative brilliance. The author effectively creates 11 completely different, completely distinct stories, only one of which goes beyond a beginning. However, all the other 10 “beginnings” draw you in, creating complete worlds, wholly formed characters and gripping plots in just a few pages. Like the “reader” in the eleventh story you wish you could read on, know what happened next, and in the process you start to question the very act of reading and the nature of the story, the satisfaction derived from plot versus the immersion into a world that is transferred from words into our imagination. Utterly brilliant 

25) The War of Art - Steven Pressfield. This is regarded as one of the most influential and inspiring books for creative professionals, cited as a must read life changing book by many. However it didn’t do anything for me. There’s nothing here that I didn’t already know and little that I don’t already apply. Whether that means I’m super disciplined or that I have zero creativity, I have no idea! 

26) Meditations - Marcus Aurelius. Profound and poetic. This book makes me realise that while science may have changed the world, the essential human questions have never changed. Who are we? Why are we here and what are we meant to do with our lives? How do we deal with a world in conflict with our quest to be our truest selves? Almost two thousand years after his death Marcus Aurelius still offers more insight on the role of a human being in an infinite universe than all the self help books you can read. 

27) The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry. What I would give to be able to write like this. McMurtry combines haunting despair with poignant lyricism. This is a stunning portrayal of a small town where nothing much happens but where every individual is a story unto themselves, from young kids discovering the lonely bleakness of adulthood to the older people trying to push back the flood of regret or in denial of their inner despair. A tale of the savage brutality, the emotional wasteland of small town life, suffused with beauty on every page, almost poetic in its language. 

28) A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood. A beautiful, poignant exploration of love and loss, of death and hope. Set in a single day in the life of an ageing professor as he struggles to cope with the death of his lover and partner, the story is able to show deeply felt personal pain and mourning, with warmth and humour, with the energy and vibrancy of renewal and hope, without soppy sentimentality.One of the few books that examines sorrow in its multi dimensionality, and in doing so enriches our understanding of it. 

29) Ants Among Elephants : An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India - Sujatha Gidla. Very important and powerful book though if anything I feel the role of caste should have played a more prominent part of the narrative. Although poverty is often a direct outcome of caste, this is a book that often feels like the history of a class struggle and doesn’t shed enough light on the everyday struggles of Dalits in India. Someday a Dalit writer will write a book on being a Dalit in modern Indian that will leave us all hanging our heads in shame in front of the mirror

30) From Here to Eternity - James Jones. There’s many books that show how hard war can be and how dehumanising and brutal the experience of war can be. But very few books show how the army at peacetime can be as difficult. This is a hard, gritty story about individuality in the context of a large institution, about the quest to do what is right and honest when surrounded by politics, rules, institutional structure, conflicting goals, violence and repressed sexuality. I do think that it could have been a hundred pages shorter but this was a brave, tough book, ahead of its time in some ways, and almost Hemingway inspired in how it looks at courage and manhood.

31) Tell Me No Lies - John Pilger. When I look at India and our newspapers and magazines, when I look at a generation that engages with nothing but entertainment and consumerism, I pray that there are still some people left with the integrity, courage and moral courage of the writers and journalists whose work is showcased in this collection of some of the best investigative journalism of the last hundred years. 

32) The Soul of Basketball : The Epic Showdown Between LeBron, Kobe, Doc and Dirk That Saved the NBA - Ian Thomsen. An excellent read for all basketball fans, especially if (like me) you rooted for Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavericks’ implausible underdog championship win 

33) Inverting the Pyramid - Jonathan Wilson. the definitive book on the evolution of football tactics. 

34) The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change - Bharat Anand. Some really interesting insights on the content business, particularly this idea of focusing on “killer” content rather than user connections. 

35) Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain. Written with passion and honesty, a great behind the scenes look at the shitty, brilliant, addictive, exhilarating, brutal life of what it really takes to be a successful chef. 

36) The Mahabharata (Ramesh Menon’s version). The definitive version of what is to my mind the greatest story every written. There are at least 40 stories here that would make great books in themselves. Characters like Karna and Abhimanyu deserve their own books and stories and yet play only supporting parts in this extraordinary saga. It doesn’t matter how familiar you are with the Mahabharata, you can’t read it without being gripped by the drama, the tension, the emotion, the pathos. If we take the Illiad and Game of Thrones and Star Wars and Bahubali and add them and multiply them by a hundred, then maybe we would get a story that has a fraction of the depth, complexity, genius and perfection of the Mahabharata 

37) Hokkaido Highway Blues - Will Ferguson. Preparatory reading before I visit Japan. A glimpse into a truly extraordinary, unique culture... a Galapagos of humanity! 

38) The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen. I am sceptical of this whole idea of “The Great American Novel” but as I got to the end of this extraordinary book, I realised this was as great as novel writing gets, and a story that captures the soul of America. Yet it remains a story that goes far beyond one midwestern American family, into every family and every one of us and our lives. The writing is stunningly beautiful, visual and evocative but raw and primal. The emotional arc goes from making you laugh at characters that seem almost satirical to the discomfort of realising that they are much too real, much too familiar and finally to complete emotional identification with the tragedy, the love and the hope. This is a masterpiece. 

39) Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami. If I was 20 years younger and still studying literature I would spend hours thinking about the “meaning” of this book, trying to decipher the symbolism. As I grow older I find that contrary to popular imagination, I “feel” more than I think, I respond to things on an emotional plane, whether books, food, art, music or people. As such, I can’t help but be completely swept away by Sputnik Sweetheart. Beyond the philosophy and the layers, this is an extraordinary tale of love and loss, one of the best I’ve read in ages. Conversational and contemporary to start with it gradually pulls you into its surreal emotional world. The words and passages create a physical feeling of floating and weightlessness, while you find yourself anchored and almost sucked into a whirlpool of extraordinary feeling and depth. One of those rare books that actually create a physical sensation in you like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, leaving you with an aching feeling of loss, longing and heartbreak. 

40) Birthday Stories : An Anthology Selected and Introduced by Haruki Murakami. Perfect birthday gift for someone who likes feeling blue. Stories of love and hope, loneliness and emptiness, youth and old age. All written with that spare beauty of the best short story writing, where you’re immersed in a world and emotionally connected to a character in just a few sentences. 

41) Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Master Media Manipulator - Ryan Holiday. I read this almost as a companion piece to The Content Trap and between the two they have profoundly impacted my understanding of communication and marketing in today’s age 

42) What is Populism? - Jan Werner Muller. Some very interesting and insightful thoughts examining the actual nature of populism and some approaches to confronting it. Very relevant for these difficult times as “populism” serves increasingly as a Trojan Horse for authoritarianism 

43) Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata. A poetically written story set in rural Japan almost a hundred years ago, it is memorable for how it captures a feeling and evokes a sense of mood while breaking away from conventional approaches to plot and character development. Written almost as a series of scenes with flashes of dialogue it still manages to capture emotional depth, of love that struggles to break beyond barriers of communication, social structures and personality. The haunting, lyrical descriptions of snow bound rural Japan transforms the setting to a character, bringing its own emotional weight to the story. 

44) Silence - Shusaku Endo. I was underwhelmed by this book that explores the essence of faith and religion, and on the struggle for primacy between belief and compassion. I can see why so many people love this book but having read the Last Temptation of Christ last year, I felt I was reading something thematically similar but with far less power, depth and sensitivity. 

45) One Piece - Eiichoro Oda. My first Manga, I need to figure what the definitive Manga book is because this left me distinctly underwhelmed. 

46) The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa. I couldn’t stop my tears as I got to the end of this extraordinary book about friendship and memory, about the search for order and meaning in a world that makes no sense. I can’t think if any author other an Ishiguro where I felt so overwhelmed with poignancy. A simply told story about the friendship between a old maths professor with a memory of just eighty minutes, his housekeeper and her ten year old son, this book has a depth and beauty that I cannot describe adequately in words. 

47) The Wonder That Was India - A L Basham. The depth and breadth of information is staggering, I just wish it was written better and with more insight. It reads too much like a textbook for me. 

48) Fear: Trump in the White House - Bob Woodward. Trump is a subject that is endlessly interesting but this book felt a little too safe, pulling its punches and lacking narrative momentum. 

49) Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst - Robert Sapolsky. Extraordinary look at the way our minds work, linking neuroscience, genetics, psychology, hormones, sociology and more. Unfortunately, at a time where people like even their intellectualism to be dumbed down, it hasn’t got the acclaim it deserves. 

50) Alone in Berlin - Hans Fallanda. Taut, gripping and deeply saddening. The brutality of totalitarian states and the struggle for human dignity in the face of horror are portrayed with great compassion through this gripping cat and mouse thriller set in Nazi Germany. 

51) Gandhi: The Years that changed the World - Ramachandra Guha. Sometimes I feel like we should throw away our modern Indian history textbooks in school and make all the kids read Guha. We would be both a better educated country and a country of better human beings. 

52) A House for Mr. Biswas - V S Naipaul. There were moments that moved me, passages and writing that we’re brilliant. But moments don’t make a masterpiece for me and this book (sacrilegious as it may sound) didn’t feel like a masterpiece to me. There were just too many moments and characters that were too exaggerated for me, often crossing the line from satire to caricature. 

53) The Boys of Summer - Roger Kahn. One of the best sports books I’ve ever read. A book about baseball but also a pastoral elegy, a book about fathers and sons, about race and class and society, about being a man, about ageing and about America itself. 

54) Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely. Trash. Amazing how much success can be found ripping off Kahneman and Tversky

55) The Schopenhauer Cure : A Novel - Irvyn D Yalom. Thought provoking book on the nature of relationships and addictions, on healing and learning to find peace and live a healthier life.