Book Suggestions

Last Updated: 3 December 2022.

These are the non-academic books I read and liked. Some of them I like very much like ‘A Clockwork Orange’ but others are just okayish and my likings of them is not at the same level as A Clockwork Orange. There are books I read and did not like. They are not in this list such as Ernest Hemingway’s The ‘Old Man and the Sea’.

I have collected some quotes from these books on a separate page.

Fiction

When I read George Orwell’s book ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, I liked it so much that I searched for other dystopian novels. Dystopia became my favorite genre. My favorite authors are Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Herman Hesse, Chuck Palahniuk, Kazuo Ishiguro, Phillip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami.

• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: A literary masterpiece.

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess : This raises a very important moral question, “Is it better to choose to be bad rather than being conditioned to do only good?”

• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: A dystopian world where every move of citizens is watched by authorities. Without spoiling too much, I would like to recommend it as it is one of my favorites.

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro: There is something about the narrators in Kazuo’s novel that i like. They can be pretty unreliable. In this one, the narrator is an AI and so it is interesting to see her perspectives and understanding of humans.

• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: A humourous book mocking scientists and religion. I like Vonnegut’s way of storytelling.

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: Margaret Atwood’s creativity and the dystopian world she had imagined really freaked me out here.

• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini: Khaled Hosseini shows the power of love through a story based in Afghanistan, a country torn apart with continuous conflict since 1978, and the Taliban rule turns the worse situation into a disaster. This is one of the saddest books I have ever read. If you want to know the situation of Afghanistan, go for it. The beginning is set in 1964 and the story ends in 2003, we see regimes switching hands so many times, with drastically different fates of women.

• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes: Heartbreaking. It is on how society treats mentally retarded. I wasn’t satisfied with some parts of the book, but overall a creative one and I was instantly drawn to it.

• Galactic Pot Healer by Phillip K. Dick : A totalitarian future USA in which information and knowledge are not free. Citizens' moves are monitored and thoughts are controlled. A pot healer on earth is unemployed due to his skill becoming obsolete as people prefer buying plastic pots over ceramic pots. An alien from other planet recruits the pot healer and other experts from other planets for a task. The book has many themes: repressive state, free will, destiny etc.

• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick: I think I need a reread as I didn’t understood it completely but I liked the fictional world created by Phillip K. Dick in this one.

• The Castle by Franz Kafka : A satire on bureacracy.

• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: This is a dystopian novel which is just so close to reality. With the technology growing up and tech corporations dominating the world, how will the future turn out for us?

• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki : Ruth Ozeki finds diary of a Japanese girl, which she suspected came from 2011 Tsunami to the shore in Canada. She gets worried about the safety of the girl while reading through the diary and a tragic tale unfolds. I didn’t like the spiritual or “quantuam mechanics” elements in the book.

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka : Explores the theme of alienation through surrealism.

• The Stranger by Albert Camus

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee : A hypocritic society seen through the lens of children of around 8 years old.

• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

• Animal Farm by George Orwell: Wanna know how democracy turns into a dictatorship? Pick up this.

• Ubik by Phillip K. Dick -Science fiction and philosophical fiction which blurs the boundary between reality and imagination.

• The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu

• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie : Very good plot. If I tell you anything about a detective novel like this, it will spoil the novel for you.

Nonfiction

• Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez.

• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

• Price of the Modi Years by Aakar Patel.

• How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

• The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State by Josy Joseph.

• Annihilation of Caste by Ambedkar.

• Phantoms in the Brain by Sandra Blakeslee, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

• Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 3rd Edition

• Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

• No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

• Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

• The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell