2019... 52 books I read and 52 reviews.

1) A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara. I was moved by this book till the halfway point but then the sheer implausibility of the plot made me lose all sympathy for the characters and any sense of relating to them. I understand that human tragedy is always interesting for writers with literary ambition but it only makes the cut if it’s believable. Any plot or character with such a litany of woes moves closer to satire or farce than the author intends or realises. This book could have been edited by two hundred pages and been better for it. 

2) Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? - Raymond Carver. Minimalistic, explosive stories, vignettes from everyday lives with the repressed violence of a silent scream. Masterful portrays of rage, desperation and emotional isolation. Impossible to describe, but impossible to put down. Carver is a god. 

3 ) No More Mr. Nice Guy - Robert A Glover. This is one of the most powerful and profound glimpses into my own psyche I could have ever read. This book is powerful and life changing for me and I hope that more people with similar challenges are able to read this book, to understand themselves better and hopefully work towards healing. We can never find a better path without acknowledging our truth, our past, the mistakes we have made and the thing that have shaped us, the patterns of destructiveness towards oneself and others because it is only after acknowledgement and recognition that the process of change and transformation can begin. 

4) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood. Probably more relevant now than when it was written in the eighties, The Handmaid’s Tale goes beyond an explanation of female identity and rights set in a dystopian future and anticipates today’s return towards a more totalitarian time, the constant creation of the “other” as an object of repression and control, and as an instrument of power. While its central themes of female sexuality, reproductive rights and role in society continue to be relevant, this is a book which has a far wider resonance today beyond the idea of gender rights 

5) Batman: The Long Halloween - Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. A fantastic detective story but made especially memorable because of the poignancy of Two Face’s origin story 

6) Fire in the Belly : On Being a Man - Sam Keen. An examination of what it is to be a man in the modern age, integrating older, ingrained warrior values with a world where traditional roles and definitions are rapidly dissolving. 

7) A Horse Walks Into a Bar - David Grossman. A work of brutal power and technical perfection. To have written a 196 page book that captures a 2 hour stand up comedy performance with all its high wire tension between the performer and the audience, all the rhythms and the energy shifts, creating a feeling like you were in the room rather than reading about it would be the work of a master. To have done so with this sort of visceral, painful, emotional power is an achievement of staggering brilliance. From the brutality of youth, the search for meaning, the need for feeling something, the fear that our lives are pointless, our inability to express or witness raw emotion or pain... Grossman takes the construct of one individual and his audience and explores all these themes, and by doing so he uses it to hold a mirror to a nation and to society itself. This is a profound book written by an absolutely essential moral voice. 

8) Black Mass : Whitey Bulgar, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal - Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neil. Shocking story about Whitey Bulgar who used his secret status as an FBI informant to not just corrupt and poison the FBI but effectively make them partners on his murderous journey to becoming the notorious crime lord of Boston. 

9) Hammer of the Gods : Led Zeppelin Unauthorised - Stephen Davis. I’m sure this was extremely exaggerated but it is a very fun read about the massive excess and brilliant music of Led Zeppelin. 

10) How Children Succeed - Paul Tough. While describing the macro, this book ends up with great perspectives on the micro, on parenting, on kids and on enabling them to grow up with the tools and attitudes that enable success. 

11) Man’s Search For Meaning - Viktor E Frankl. What is it that enables us to survive suffering, despair, horror... to look to the future, to find a reason to exist, to find a strength, to find meaning in continued existence? This powerful real life story of a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, his experiences and realisations, offers wisdom, insight and strength to anyone seeking the courage to move forward in difficult times. 

12) Killing Commendatore - Haruki Murakami. I started out feeling that this felt almost imitative of Murakami’s earlier work (especially Wind Up Bird Chronicle and IQ84), like I was reading genre fiction. But eventually the story sweeps you along becoming a page turner with all the whimsy and mastery of plot and description that make Murakami one of the world’s greatest writers. 

13) The Laughing Monsters - Denis Johnson.  Funny, cynical modern twist on Graham Greene/Le Carre about renegade spies in Africa. 

14) Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World - Snigdha Poonam. Fascinating, scary, gripping stories about what drives young people in India. While looking at the country through a North Indian lens, Snigdha Poonam vividly captures the hunger, ambition and desperation of millions of young Indians who aspire to a better life in a country which has failed spectacularly in creating the opportunities or the skills that may enable them to fulfil their aspiration. Her frightening accounts of the rage, greed and frustration fuelling these young (mostly) men have implications for every aspect of Indian society, from corruption to governance, ethnic violence to social breakdown. 

15) The Neighbourhood - Mario Vargas Llosa. An entertaining enough read on its own but I feel Llosa really diminishes his legacy by writing average quality genre fiction. I understand that he finds erotica and crime and thrillers interesting but the end result is like going to a 3 Michelin star restaurant and eating a Big Mac. It’s not that a Big Mac doesn’t have its guilty pleasures but there is a time and place for everything. 

16) SPQR - Mary Beard. Brilliant history of Ancient Rome. It’s quite staggering how Mary Beard packs a millennium of history into 500 pages, merging intellectual rigour with narrative crispness. Never pedantic, never superficial, never dense, .. this is history writing at its best. 

17) Jude The Obscure - Thomas Hardy. The specifics change with every generation but the story stays the same. Society rewards the conformists and hypocrites while eating up the sensitive, the dreamers, the brave ones, the ones who challenge moral or social convention. It is amazing and also deeply saddening how much of this story is still relevant today.

18) Black Leopard, Red Wolf - Marlon James. It’s not an African Game of Thrones or an African Tolkien or a literary Black Panther like the reviews say but the furious, unstoppable mash up of all these influences, infused with (or rather powered by) mythology and magic. Yes it is verbose. Yes it doesn’t have much of a plot. Yes it is derivative, almost genre fiction, combining many ideas from science fiction, fantasy and racial identity that we’ve read before. But it does so in a fevered, feverish, unshackled language with a kinetic, propulsive force, creating a world so magically and fully imagined that it’s like nothing I have ever read before, a book so startlingly, brilliantly original that I cannot wait to read the next two parts. 

19) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup - John Carreyrou. Yet another stunning example of how little experts know  for all their claims of expertise. It blows my mind that a company that effectively had no product had a valuation of 9 billion dollars, while everyone from global business leaders, the venture capital and finance community, to senior government officials kept drinking the cool aid. 

20) The Anatomy of Hate - Revati Laul. I was put off by some of the biases creeping into the writing (like portraying Modi as a key player in Advani’s Yath Yatra). However it doesn’t stop this book from being a powerful and insightful look at the motivations behind religious violence and hatred.. to look at religious polarisation and it’s consequences through the lens of the individual rather than the community.

21) The World According to Garp - John Irving. An extraordinarily moving novel, full of empathy and whimsy, both surreal and realistic, filled with violence and soaked with love. While the big themes around identity, sexuality, gender and feminism gives it relevance for most readers today it affected me at a much simpler, personal level. I have rarely seen the neuroticism of what it is to be a family man...a son, a husband, a father, an individual..portrayed with such poignancy, warmth, humour and empathy. All the insecurities and ego, hopes and fears, dreams and memories, trauma and healing, pain and love... captured with a kindness and honesty that brought tears to my eyes. 

22) Factfulness - Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund. Random. Boring. Pointless. 

23) Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods - Rick Riordan. The things we do for our kids. 

24) The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway. I read this book again after almost twenty years to see if it still had the same effect, or whether I had built it up in my head and exaggerated its brilliance and perfection. Nothing has changed in terms of how this book affects me. I cannot imagine a more perfectly written book anywhere in the world. Not one word is superfluous or out of place. Every single thought and scene is written with complete honesty. This is writing that attains perfection, that shows you that purity doesn’t come with embellishment but by polishing and polishing and cutting away every unnecessary flourish until you come down to that brilliant, shining core, just a story and the words to tell them, to move you emotionally, to make you feel you are there with the fisherman and the boy and the fish and the sharks, to make you understand what life is and death is and what it is to live to the best of one’s ability. If there is only one book a person should read in their life, this is it. 

25) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Another book I read again after close to two decades. I had been underwhelmed when I first read it and always felt that Love In The Time of Cholera was much better. This time however I was swept away and into the magical town of Macondo and the beautiful, poignant, epic sweep of Buendía family saga. I could see how the book had influenced so many others (including The God of Small Things) not just through magic realism as in Rushdie but in its evocativeness, in its ability to make things like temperature and humidity and plants and vegetation and the physical environment a living, breathing character, every bit as important and powerful as any human being, and with the same ability to create and evoke emotion in the reader. Masterful. 

26) TIME: 85 Years of Great Writing. Fantastic compilation of the best writing from Time Magazine over 85 years. Some of the pieces, especially from the mid 20th century are serious literary works, going far beyond our conception of the straightjackets of form and convention and constrain most magazine articles. The other thing that fascinated me was seeing history being written about in the present, without the benefit of hindsight, as current affairs and not as history. The Korean War foreshadowing and predicting the horrors of Vietnam and the loss of moral legitimacy of the United States as the nature of warfare changes after the Second World War. The sense of wonder and miracle as they write about Man’s first steps on the moon. This book is filled with many such extraordinary moments and pieces, pieces that are vivid and powerful in the context of their time and place, but serve a deeper, more introspective purpose with the benefit of time. 

27) Che Guevara : A Revolutionary Life - Jon Lee Anderson. The definitive biography of Che Guevara, researched not just with great diligence but great depth, and capturing the entire arc of his life from a bourgeois, self indulgent youth through his political and spiritual awakening and his pitiful death in the forests and hills of Bolivia. While you can’t help but admire Che’s sense of integrity, his sacrifice and his courage, as well as his deep empathy for the underprivileged, this book also helps look at the man beyond the romanticised mythology. The fanatical dogmatism, the brutal and casual cruelty, the inability to see individuals as human beings outside of his political framework of a class struggle. It is important to read this as the story not just of a romantic revolutionary but also as the story of a zealot, someone who with greater success could have walked a path not very different from Mao or Stalin. 

28) The Gifts if Imperfection : Let Go Of Who  You Think You’re Supposed To Be and Embrace Who You Are - Brene Brown. Another book with great insights in my journey to find peace, wisdom and acceptance, to try and be a better person. 

29) So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed - Jon Ronson. Funny and moving, an honest and often troubling look at the nature of public shaming in the digital age, especially on social media. It forces you to look within ourselves as individuals and as a society and examine whether we’re that different from the presumably well intentioned but undeniably monstrous people who burnt witches at Salem. 

30) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay - Michael Chabon. There were parts of the book that had a magical, transportive quality, especially when describing the world of magic in Europe or New York through the prism of the rise of comic books. However, what could have been a moving tribute to comic books and the rise of a new form of art and storytelling fails to rise above a maudlin love story. The author carries the weight of trying to write a “great American novel” of characters rather than stay the course on a truly unique theme. It’s a good read, but somewhere in it lie the seeds of a great book.

31) Healing the Shame that Binds You - John Bradshaw. One of the two most important books I’ve read as I continue on my journey of healing and spiritual awakening. It has helped me get clarity and make peace with the past, help me try and break free from the cycle of toxic shame that has shaped my entire life since childhood, and given me strength for the life I have to and want to live. 

32) The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch. This is a hard book to review. I hate hate books where key plot points hinge on implausible coincidences and this book as several, some of which are so absurd that they could have been written by an amateur. The spiritual questions and the metaphysics also left me cold. That being said I still found it gripping and found it hard to put it down. The description of places was beautiful. The nasty, bullying, delusional, self absorbed narrator was compelling, unique and memorable. Most of all, I loved how it examines the idea of “in love” as delusion, as self deception, as fantasy that is created to protect and preserve ourselves. The capacity of people to deceive themselves when it comes to love and the people they love is a topic that isn’t examined enough and Iris Murdoch does so with a rawness and honesty that feels almost like a voyeuristic experience. 

33) The Triumph of Christianity: How The Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion - Rodney Stark. I wonder if I wanted to read Bart Ehrman’s similarly named book and bought this by mistake. Because this is really pretty shit. It starts out fairly well when it discusses the social, religious and political context within which Christianity emerged during the Roman Empire but the moment it moves past the Roman Empire, it loses all structural, narrative and thematic coherence. I was interested in understanding how a tiny Jewish sect ended up as the world’s largest and most powerful religion. What I got instead was a polemic that aims at defending Christianity against existing narratives about everything from the rise of Islam to the Crusades to the conflict between Science and Religion. I don’t think these are unimportant topics but the ostensible theme of the book really did deserve a more meticulously researched and narrated book. Meanwhile the events that this book skims over deserve focused attention in themselves and could do with much more depth and insight, less opining and a lot fewer adjectives attacking everything and everyone from Voltaire to Richard Dawkins. 

34) The Famished Road - Ben Okri. Bit of a strange book to write about. I found the writing lyrical and evocative and the relationship between the child and his parents very moving. I was really amazed by how the author captured Africa in all its magic and wonder and vibrancy, a land of history and magic, of hope and struggle. I loved how the family’s quest to emerge from the burden of the past to a place of dignity mirrors the journey of post colonial Nigeria and Africa itself. However, I struggled with the absence of any real plot. I don’t necessarily need a plot to love a book, but it’s just that the set-pieces, whether the fights or the dream sequences or the illnesses, all followed a set pattern, and when the scenes get so repetitive, no amount of beautiful writing compensates for the dulling of wonder and surprise one feels. 

35) Walden - Henry David Thoreau. Sometimes you need to read a book that strips you of your intellectual pretentious and shows the limits of your abilities of comprehension. Last year it was Labyrinths by Borges. This year it was Walden by Thoreau. It really wasn’t in me to finish this book. I understood the words but as I read page after page of dense prose and interminable sentences, my eyes glazed over and my brain went numb. I couldn’t relate to the extreme libertarianism of Thoreau and I felt his experience as a Noble Savage was little more than the White Man’s privilege. I hate writing that references classics and flaunts knowledge so self-reverentially and I detest dogma. Any book that takes an extreme perspective on a way of living or thinking and tries to claim it is a superior way to see life and the world risks becoming a polemic. When that is combined with an unreadable style I can only describe the book as execrable. 

36) Exit West - Mohsin Hamid. This felt like a novel of two halves that were written by two writers of similar style but widely different ability. The first half of the novel, set in an unnamed city in an unnamed country that feels a lot like Pakistan is beautiful. The writing is occasionally self-conscious (at one stage Hamid uses two metaphors back to back as like a high school essayist who can’t choose a favourite turn of phrase) but is often haunting and achingly evocative. He captures the feeling of falling in love and losing those we love, faith and the rejection of faith, the terrors of revolution and the terrors of escape, of a nation and individuals caught between the weight of history reasserting itself and a new post-modern identity seeking its birth... all with a raw intensity and beauty that reminded me of Mothsmoke at its best. The moment the protagonists journey to the west though, the narrative becomes stilted and ridden with cliches, stumbling under the burden of its narrative and philosophical ambition, as the characters stop feeling fully fleshed out and descend into predicable caricature. As a novel about immigration and how the world (especially the western world) reacts to it, Exit West becomes hopelessly turgid, superficial and pretentious, with no emotional impact. I feel it’s a book that would have read much better as a novella.. put away at the halfway point, and living on in our imagination.  

37) On The Road - Jack Kerouac. I usually have a problem with novels when conversations digress into intellectual and philosophical discourses that seem unnatural, their self consciousness betraying a certain lack of honesty in the writing, an awareness of an audience and a desire to please. This is one book where I was able to look past that, propelled the sheer kinetic energy of the writing, its propulsive force and rhythm, the sweating, intoxicated high that may be a burning fever of just the jazz burning through your veins. This isn’t just a novel but a gospel for young people who question laws and morals and social institutions and the sanitised notion of post-war America, the shining city on the hill. Yet it manages to avoid the trap of nihilism, and the road is just a metaphor for a spiritual journey, the search within oneself and the quest for someone or something that actually MEANS something. This may not be a book that moved me emotionally, but it moved me in an almost physical way. This is one of the greatest American novels, a book that continues to and will continue to inspire seekers and dreamers and rebels and searchers as long as books are read. 

38) The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway : The Finca Vigia Edition - Ernest Hemingway. It was strange to read this this straight after Kerouac considering so much of the beats and On The Road was written as an antithesis to Hemingway, an attempt to create a new style that moved away from Hemingway’s sparse realism, an attempt that succeeded. Yet, you only need to read a few pages of this book to be reminded why Hemingway was and will always be the greatest writer who ever lived. This may not be the most consistent or cohesive collection, but even a collection of short stories published in magazines (and some unpublished) teaches you more about writing and life and gives you more pleasure than all but a handful of writers to have ever written. 

39) Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry. USA Today wrote that if you were to read one Western in your life, read Lonesome Dove. I would go further. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a more emotionally satisfying book set in American history. It captures the moment when “civilisation” truly tamed the frontier and is shot through with a aching sense of history, of sadness, a paean to a time and a spirit and way of life that is fading despite the stubborn efforts of the men clinging on to their sense of the past as age and regret creeps up on them. It captures the toughness and the strength of the men and women, the cowboys and Mexicans and blacks and Indians, and their dignity and humanity in a way that moves you and makes you cry. Most of all though, it is filled with a love for a place, in all its beauty and its harshness, its gift of life and hope and promise and its cruel certainty of struggle and death. It is a love letter to the American frontier like no other. 

40) Manson - Jeff Guinn. A really well researched and written book and one that still leaves me astounded that the events described in it could actually have happened. I know people talk about Wild Wild Country but this is a better exploration of the nature of cults and leaders, the hold they have on their followers, the way vulnerability and the trauma of childhood seek a sense of home and belonging, and the way reality and values are built of shifting sands of perception and need. This is chilling and deeply troubling and written like a thriller. 

41) Business on a Platter: What Makes Restaurants Sizzle or Fizzle Out - Anoothi Vishal. This is the Bible for anyone in India who ever wants to get into the F and B business. It covers every kind of restaurant from food courts to Indian Accent and examines the challenges, finances and thinking that go into making a successful F and B business. There’s no book like this that has ever been written in the Indian restaurant business. 

42) Necropolis - Santiago Gamboa. I am amazed at the complete fearlessness and inventiveness of the great Latin American writers. They aren’t constrained by rules and convention, by form or structure, by traditions like the narrative arc or the structure of acts. This book has one broad story set in a conference in a war torn version of Jerusalem but that’s story exists merely as a framework, within which speak multiple voices telling multiple stories of love and death and betrayal and revenge and sex and pornography and drugs and religion and metamorphosis and discover. Murder mysteries bump into stories about chess and chess players which make way for the life of a porn star who recedes while a messiah emerges from the streets of Florida and you don’t know what to believe depending on who the narrator of a story is. I guess the only thread binding them all is that they are stories of human lives, and how words and memory help shape our understanding of the life people live and the meaning we bestow those lives with. 

43 ) Rising Star: The Making of Barrack Obama - David J Garrow. This is the definitive book about Barack Obama and his life, far removed from the usual hagiographies or polemical criticisms, almost academic in the sheer breadth and depth of its research while never losing sight of the human story. Through classroom debates and academic submissions to the people who shaped Obama’s life, mentors and lovers and benefactors and volunteers, he tells us the story of Obama’s life over the course of 1400 pages. The story of how a regular kid from Honolulu became the world’s most powerful man. For the first time a book captures both sides of the Obama story...the extraordinary journey and hope of his rise and his eventual descent into becoming just another politician, from progressive beacon to the CIA’s biggest supporter, from a man of integrity and principle to the great incremental compromiser who walked back on his self-proclaimed red line as children in Syria died, along with the hopes and dreams of a new American awakening. In that story he speaks of how it isn’t just politics that corrupts but a man’s own ambition and the pursuit of power, his sense of destiny, his need for achievement and recognition... the corrosive path where pragmatism and compromise are two sides of the same coin.. where a person achieves all he ever wanted, all he ever dreamt of, only to be a different person from the person who first had the dream...

44) Who rules the world? - Noam Chomsky. While as brilliant as ever Chomsky would be more readable and plausible if he displayed the same scepticism about countries like Russia and China that he does about the USA. The book could also do with some editing. A collection of essays doesn’t excuse the same things being said in almost exactly the same words in multiple chapters. Those quibbles aside, he remains one of the great moral voices in this world, and I wonder who will take his place as the preeminent public intellectual speaking truth to power.

45) Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury. Such and important book for our times. There are moments when the writing gets preachy and self conscious but most times it has a a brutal, poetic power, almost cinematic in how visual it is. The central theme though, about the loss of freedom, and how it is often the choices that we make (or do not make) as individuals that lead to totalitarian control resonates like a clarion call in these troubled times.

46) Between the World and Me: Ta-Nehisi Coates. Beautifully and powerfully written, poetic, evocative and powerful. It’s hard to review because I don’t think anyone who isn’t Black can completely relate to or fully understand the Black experience as the author describes it, except at some sort of broad universal, humanist level. I did feel that the book generalised excessively, and that some connections were both simplistic and a bit of a stretch. But these are minor quibbles because you can’t read this as a scholarly work but almost a window through which we can look into the black experience from an individual, community and historical perspective and get a sense of both the emotional weight and impact of it, as well as the relative objectivity that comes with time and distance, including economic distance. I just wish there were such powerful and powerfully imagined pieces of writing I could find about other communities who I seek to understand better, especially Dalits and Muslims.

47 ) The Lucifer Effect - Phillip Zimbardo. In a world of moral posturing and virtue signalling, of binary narratives this account of the pathbreaking experiment is a must read, one that shatters the comforting and comfortable lies we tell ourselves. The world is not divided into good people and evil people, and while it’s easy to claim that “I would never do that” or “how could he/she do that?” , those positions are often the outcome of circumstances rather than some ingrained moral virtue. That isn’t to say that wrong actions are justified. But that good people can make mistakes, can do bad things, and the way forward is through understanding rather than public posturing and self-deceiving judgement based on a false sense of moral superiority.

48 ) The Discovery of India - Jawaharlal Nehru. I was struck by two contradictory thoughts when I read this book. On the one hand I was struck by Nehru’s naïveté. Towards China of course. But even more towards our country and her people, in his faith in our tolerance and acceptance and kindness and goodness, his dreams of our potential to be a great moral force and an example to all the peoples of the world. At the same time I was struck by the depth of his knowledge and intellect, as well as a life lived in the service of his country. I was amazed at how he dedicated his whole life to the idea of India at her best, dedicating the full force of his intellect and personality to a dream, however naive it may have been. Most of all I was saddened. Our first Prime Minister’s greatest failing was his naive belief in the best in us and what our country could be. Our current Prime Minister’s greatest strength is a clear eyed understanding of the worst in us and what our country really is and his cynical exploitation of the same. 

49 ) Mumbai Modern. Progressive Artists Group 1947-2013 - Published by Delhi Art Gallery. A wonderful introduction to Indian Modern Art and the figures that gave birth to it as well as their work

50 ) The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - James Thurber . Whimsical collection of short stories looking at the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives. It was darker than I expected and sharper than I expected. It’s not Raymond Carver but after the schmaltz of the movie, the strength of the writing was a wonderful surprise. 

51 ) The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky. It’s hard trying to put a novel in context and try and understand it’s “greatness”. Initially it felt like a Russian Jane Austen with a Christ like central protagonist. But the further I read the harder it was to get a sense of its shape or form or style or themes. Part soap opera, part theological and political commentary, part metaphor, part a comedy of manners, part tragedy, it was hard to understand what it truly is. Maybe that’s the point. And while the titular Idiot, Prince Myshkin, may seem not just naive and idealistic but implausible as a character, at some level at a time when I seek to find kindness on an everyday basis, it is also a character that is deeply moving and inspiring. 

52 ) Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro. Not as powerful or moving as his novels, but a great showcase for his genius. No author unlocks the power of what is unsaid and what is unwritten quite like Ishiguro, giving his work an emotional depth that very few contemporary authors (Alice Munro

comes to mind) match. The only unfortunate thing is that the short story format doesn’t allow you to really live with the characters, making it a book of powerful moments rather than a powerful book.