This year has been great if I look it from reading’s perspective. I’ve not always been curious regarding different topics at the same time, but things were distinctly separate in 2020. It happened probably due to COVID-19 lockdown. I’ve had time, so I spent a big chunk of my days reading different books.

There are lots of books on this list which I’d like to re-read, or I should say most of them, and I’ll probably start going through them slowly, but I’m not sure. I love reading highlights, and I might stick to that.

Life’s getting little busier, and that’s why I’m writing this blog at the moment as if I won’t do it now, I’ll probably forget to do it in the future.

One of the things that got little messed is that I didn’t care to review or write anything about the books I read. While reading, I did highlight. I read epubs. That’s the end.

I’m going to leave this post with the list of books, and hopefully, I’d come back to it so that I can write a couple of sentences for each of them. None of the books on this list is BS, I picked them very carefully, as I had no intention to get bored while reading. As of now, since I’m more or less used to the “reading”, from the next year, there won’t be any hardcore level of cherry-picking. I’ll pick new authors, read new books, read less famous books, review them, and review the old books, too.

Since I had to read everything using my phone or laptop, as of now, I can confidently say that I don’t like reading. It’s not something that I “enjoy”. While I do like the idea of having something read. That’s it. I don’t have any goals regarding reading. For enjoyment, I’d rather watch a movie, but I don’t do that either, so I read books in my free time. I’m not a bibliophile, I don’t even know its spelling, I just googled it.

The list’s divided into three categories.


Part A

Self-discovered books. Picked them up after reading the summary. The main focus was to learn more about religion, philosophy, and a little bit of psychology, politics and love.

History

  • The Last Jew of Treblinka ― Chil Rajchman
  • Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World―Jack Weatherford
  • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus ― Charles C. Mann
  • The Wonder That Was India ― Arthur Llewellyn Basham .
  • Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics ― Tim Marshall

Classics / Non Fiction

  • Night ― Elie Wiesel

Philosophy

  • The Myth of Sisyphus ― Albert Camus
  • Nausea ― Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Steppenwolf ― Hermann Hesse
  • What is Called Thinking? ― Martin Heidegger
  • The Stranger ― Albert Camus
  • The Wisdom of Insecurity ― Alan Watts
  • The Book of Disquiet ― Fernando Pessoa
  • Meditations ― Marcus Aurelius
  • Critique of Pure Reason ― Immanuel Kant
  • Who am I? ― Sri Ramana Maharshi
  • Mortality ― Christopher Hitchens
  • At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails ― Sarah Bakewell
  • On Love ― Alain De Botton
  • The Plague ― Albert Camus
  • Tao Te Ching ― Lao Tzu
  • A History of Western Philosophy ― Bertrand Russell
  • Poetry, Language, Thought ― Martin Heidegger
  • Being and Time ― Martin Heidegger
  • On Violence ― Hannah Arendt
  • Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown ― Alan W. Watts

Science / Philosophy

  • The Demon-Haunted World ― Carl Sagan
  • A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing ― Lawrence M. Krauss
  • The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God- Carl Sagan
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ― Thomas S. Kuhn

Religion

  • God Is Not Great ― Christopher Hitchens
  • God Delusion ― Richard Dawkins
  • Outgrowing God ― Richard Dawkins
  • Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources ― Martin Lings
  • History of God ― Karen Armstrong
  • The Great Divorce ― C.S. Lewis
  • God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist ― Victor J. Stenger
  • Atheism: The Case Against God ― George H. Smith
  • Why I am Not a Muslim ― Ibn Warraq
  • Islam: A Short History ― Karen Armstrong
  • The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason ― Sam Harris
  • Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith ― Jon Krakauer

Spirituality / Philosophy

  • A Search In Secret India ― Paul Brunton
  • The Dhammapada ― Ananda Maitreya
  • The Way of Zen ― Alan W. Watts
  • The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi ― Ramana Maharshi

Politics

  • Manufacturing Consent ― Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
  • Fascism: A Warning ― Madeleine K. Albright

Classics / Literature / Fiction / Contemporary

  • Persuasion ― Jane Austen
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes ― Ray Bradbury
  • The Sirens of Titan ― Kurt Vonnegut
  • Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close ― Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Dandelion Wine ― Ray Bradbury
  • A Passage to India ― E.M. Forster

Psychology

  • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion ― Jonathan Haidt
  • Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are ― Daniel Nettle
  • Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions ― Dan Ariely
  • The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty ― Simon Baron-Cohen

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Part B

On Instagram, I asked for the recommendations, and received tons of suggestions., but I found two books interesting.

  • Metamorphosis ― Franz Kafka
  • Outliers ― Malcolm Gladwell
  • 1984 George Orwell
  • Animal Farm George Orwell

The last two books were suggested by one of my friends during a conversation. She also introduced me to George Orwell’s work. I’m also thankful to my another friend who introduced me to Kafka’s work.

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Part C

A few more books that I came across and skimmed through the pages. They are in my reading list. I do have read the summary, dozens of quotes, and watched videos based on them if they were available.

  • Crime and Punishment ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • The Brothers Karamazov ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • The Idiot ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • The Kite Runner ― Khaled Hosseini
  • The 48 Laws of Power ― Robert Greene
  • The Castle ― Franz Kafka
  • War and Peace ― Leo Tolstoy
  • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ― Michel Foucault


In case you’re reading this -

Don’t get intimidated by the number of books. The only reason I could read them is due to the lockdown. I had nothing better to do, and that’s why I could explore this dimension. I’m not an avid reader, but as I mentioned earlier - I like the idea of having something read. Nothing more, nothing less. This is where it ends.