2022 Reading List

-

  1. Little Women — Louisa May Alcott — (4/5)
  2. A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson — (3.5/5)
  3. What is History? — E H Carr — (4.5/5)
  4. Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett — (4.5/5)
  5. The Penguin History of the World — J M Roberts & Odd Arne Westadd — (4/5)
  6. Outgrowing God — Richard Dawkins — (3.5/5)
  7. The Courage to Be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga — (3/5)
  8. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe — (2.75/5)
  9. The Doors of Perception (including Heaven and Hell) — Aldous Huxley (3/5)
  10. Gora — Rabindranath Tagore — (4/5)
  11. गोदान — Munshi Premchand — (4/5)
  12. A Room of One's Own — Virginia Woolf — (3.5/5)
  13. Sea of Poppies — Amitav Ghosh — (4.75/5)
  14. Dubliners — James Joyce — (4.25/5)
  15. The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk — (4.75/5)
  16. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone — Lori Gottlieb — (3/5)
  17. The Vicar of Wakefield — Oliver Goldsmith — (5/5)
  18. Babbitt — Sinclair Lewis — (3.5/5)
  19. The Awakening — Kate Chopin — (4/5) 
  20. To Kill a Mocking Bird — Harper Lee — (5/5) 
  21. Why I am an Atheist and other works — Bhagat Singh — (3.5/5)
  22. My India — Jim Corbett — (4/5)
  23. The Ladybird — D H Lawrence — (3.5/5) 
  24. The Fox — D H Lawrence — (4/5) 
  25. Moll Flanders — Daniel Defoe — (2.75/5)
  26. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad  — (3.75/5)
  27. Your God is Too Small — Essays — (3.5/5)
  28. The Story of Philosophy — Will Durant — (5/5)
  29. Famous Five (Collection I) — Enid Blyton — (3/5)
  30. The Tales of Beedle the Bard — J K Rowling — (2/5)
  31. ऐ लड़की — Krishna Sobti — (1.5/5)
  32. Preparing for Death — Arun Shourie — (1.5/5)
  33. Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck — (2.5/5) 
  34. Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury — (3/5)
  35. Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt Vonnegut Jr. — (4.5/5)
  36. Lord of the Flies — William Golding — (3/5)
  37. Disgrace — J M Coetzee — (5/5)
  38. Evolution — Sri Aurobindo — (5/5) 
  39. The Riddle of This World — Sri Aurobindo — (3/5) 
  40. The Cossacks — Leo Tolstoy — (4/5) 
  41. Educated — Tara Westover — (1/5)
  42. Annihilation of Caste — Dr. B R Ambedkar — (5/5)
  43. The Penguin History of Modern Russia — Robert Service — (4/5)
  44. Credence — Penelope Douglas — (1.5/5)
  45. An Outline of Philosophy — Bertrand Russell — (4/5)
  46. The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity — Steven Strogatz — (3/5)
  47. The Adventures of Augie March  — Saul Bellow — (5/5)

                  Comments

                  Post a Comment

                  Popular posts from this blog

                  Fatal One-liners

                  -
                  In this age of self-help books and personality development courses, certain one-liners have played havoc in the contented lives of the masses. These one-liners are sustenance unto millions who suffer from lack of self-worth. They are charged, as it were, with divine potency, making the repetitioner of them surmount incompetency. "Believe in yourself", "You have it in you", "You can do it" and many more such tug at the human gullibility for self-belief. You will agree with me when you see girls of all sizes and shapes flocking to air hostess training institutes. Girls, regardless of their vital statistics, seek admission into these institutes on the strength of that woeful one-liner, "Believe in yourself." And, none of these girls wants to work for a domestic airline. They want to be on the aircrew of either Kingfisher or Lufthansa or some renowned international airlines. Hats off to the counsellors who convince these girls into dreaming such s
                  Read more

                  To ChatGPT, or Not to ChatGPT

                  -
                  The other day, my YouTube listing featured a video on novel-writing using ChatGPT. I did not bother to watch it. I like to keep certain aspects of my naivety intact. Now, Khan Academy plans to deploy ChatGPT-powered tutors to replace human tutors. That was another trigger to bemoan the oncoming demise of the teaching profession on social media. The profession enjoyed an imagined immunity from digitization. It was touted as the most in-person thing, after mothering and nursing, that children cannot do without. Although COVID lockdown came very close to dismantling that notion, the ineffectiveness of online instruction was evident to all participants including parents. But, online learning is not an instance of AI. AI was involved only so far as to cut out a father walking into the camera with only a towel hanging by the waist. Before children realized the usefulness of background blur feature, they had pried into the homes of their classmates sometimes allowing that voyeuristic pleasure
                  Read more

                  My Atheism

                  -
                  In my eagerness to commit to writing my conversion to atheism, I was missing the tiny wick of the lamp on the altar. The eagerness is not without a tinge of melancholy. Compared to the time I spent tending to my faith, my lapse from faith is very recent. I still hear the creak of that door shutting behind me. People ask what happened. I am at a loss to explain. Therefore, this blogpost. The idea of God always attracted me. He was a figure with whom I often conversed. While my trust in people always diminished on re-evaluation, God always grew in my re-assessment of Him. Troubles intensified my prayers, happiness made me grateful: Faith met no challenge whatsoever. I relished believing in an invisible Being. My reason became the handmaid of faith. Reason argued, “Faith cannot be rationalized; it is prior to reason. There is a reason why it is called faith, in the first place.” God had an unquestionable hold on me. Of course, if God is prayed to as a benefactor and arbiter, that belief c
                  Read more