My Favourite Books

I am a (happy) victim of the reading bug which Simon Leys described, as I wrote in one of my blog posts, as “an illness and a joy”. 

Below is a list of some of them that have stood out in my (very subjective) assessment. It is somewhat like a very personal list of best books of all time.

I have used two criteria while identifying this list: (1) I intend to re-read the book at least once more and/or (b) I have been taking notes either in the book itself (whether physical or digital) or collecting some interesting, thought-provoking in a “commonplace book” - akin to the 14th century Italian merchants' zibaldone - I have kept beside me over several decades. 

(This table  will be updated now and then.)

Genre	Author	Book Title	Comments
Art	E.H. Gombrich	The Story of Art
Biography, Intellectual History	Christopher Norris	Derrida
Biography, Intellectual History	Sarah Bakewell	At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails
Consciousness/Mind	Marilynne Robinson	Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
Essays, Lit. Criticism	George Steiner	No Passion Spent
Essays, Lit. Criticism	George Steiner	At the New Yorker
Ethnic relations	Michael Ignatieff	The Warrior's Honor
Fiction	Graham Greene	The Power & the Glory
Fiction	Graham Greene	A Burnt-Out Case
Fiction	Paul Scott	A Division of the Spoils	Scott deserves to be as well-known as Forster.
Fiction	Christopher Isherwood	A Meeting by the River
Fiction	E.M. Forster	A Passage to India
Fiction	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	Cancer Ward
Fiction	Arthur Koestler	Darkness at Noon
Fiction	J.M. Coetzee	Disgrace
Fiction	Marilynne Robinson	Gilead
Fiction	W Somerset Maugham	Razor's Edge
Fiction	Margaret Atwood	The Blind Assassin
Fiction	Mario Vargas Llosa	The Feast of the Goat
Fiction	John Steinbeck	The Grapes of Wrath	I will recall the last scene in this book till the day I die.
Fiction	Amitav Ghosh	The Hungry Tide
Fiction	Haruki Murakami	The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Fiction/History	Vasily Grossman	Life and Fate	Grossman is as good as – if not better than – Solzhenitsyn.
Fiction/Non-Fiction	Jorge Luis Borges	Labyrinths* * and anything and everything by JLB	This is my all-time favourite writer
Fiction/Philosophy	Hermann Hesse	Damian
Fiction/Science Fiction	Ray Bradbury	Fahrenheit 451
Fiction/Science Fiction	Philip K Dick	Human Is? (and other stories)
Fiction/Science Fiction	Isaac Asimov	The Robots of Dawn
History	Anne Applebaum	Gulag: A History
History	Geoffrey Blainey	A Short History of the World
History	Norman Davies	Europe East and West
History	Aldous Huxley	The Devils of Loudun
History	Barbara Tuchman	The March of Folly	One of the best and most perceptive history books I have ever read
History/Memoirs	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	The Gular Archipelago
History (WW2)	Ian Kershaw	Fateful Choices
Literary Criticism	Alberto Manguel	The Library At Night	Manguel’s book will turn a bibliophobic into a bibliophile.
Memoir	Vasily Grossman	An Armenian Sketchbook
Music	Jonathan Biss	Beethoven's Shadow
Music/Psychology	Anthony Storr	Music and the Mind
Music/Psychology	Daniel J Levitin	This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Neuroscience	Eric R Kandel	In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
Neuroscience/Philosophy	Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker	Neuroscience and Philosophy:
		Brain, Mind, and Language
Non-Fiction	Primo Levi	The Periodic Table
Non-Fiction/Autobiography	W. Somerset Maugham	The Summing Up
Non-Fiction/India	Paul Scott	My Appointment With the Muse
Non-Fiction/Memoirs	Primo Levi	If This is a Man & The Truce
Non-Fiction/Memoirs	Primo Levi	Moments of Reprieve
Non-Fiction/Memoirs	Primo Levi	The Drowned and the Saved
Philosophy	Karen Armstrong	A Short History of Myth
Philosophy	Albert Einstein	Ideas and Opinions
Philosophy	Jan Westerhoff	Reality: a Very Short Introduction
Philosophy	S. Radhakrishnan	Religion and Society
Philosophy	John Gray	Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Philosophy	Joseph Campbell	The Myths We Live By
Philosophy	Joseph Campbell	The Power of Myth
Philosophy	Erwin Schrondinger	What Is Life?	A book from one of the best minds in history.
Philosophy/ Ethics & Moral Philosophy	Hannah Arendt	Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil
Philosophy/Art	Arthur Koestler	The Sleepwalkers
Philosophy/Cognitive Science	Douglas Hofstadter & Daniel C Dennett (eds)	Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul	Challenging, absorbing, intelligent
Philosophy/Comparative Philosophy	Aldous Huxley	The Perennial Philosophy	If you have time for only one book on comparative philosophy, this is the one.
Philosophy/Religion	J-F. Revel and Matthieu Ricard	The Monk and the Philosopher
Philosophy/Science	Douglas Hofstadter	Godel, Escher, Bach
Philosophy/Science	Jim Holt	Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
Political Science /Essays	Simon Leys	The Hall of Uselessness
Psychology / General	Raymond Tallis	Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity	See my blogpost
Psychology/Buddhism	The Dalai Lama and Francisco J Varela	Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying
Religion / Biblical Studies / Exegesis & Hermeneutics	Karen Armstrong	The Bible
Science	Stephen Hawking	A Brief History of Time
Science	Carl Sagan	Broca's Brain
Science	James Gleick	Chaos
Science	Timothy Ferris (ed)	World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics
Science / Cognitive Science	Iain McGilchrist	The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Science / Cognitive Science/Philosophy	Stephen S. Hall	Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience
Science/ Philosophy & Social Aspects	Henry Margenau and Abraham Varghese	Cosmos, Bios, Theos
Science/Philosophy	Freeman Dyson	A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe
Science/Philosophy	Paul Davies	Mind of God	The book that made me fall in love with popular science books.
Science/Philosophy/Buddhism	Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan	The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet
Science/Philosophy/Psychology	Ken Wilber	Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Greatest Physicists
Science/Tibetan Buddhism	B. Alan Wallace	Choosing Reality
Travel	Colin Thubron	Behind the Wall
Travel/Autobiography	Wilfred Thesiger	Arabian Sands
Travel/India/Religion	William Dalrymple	Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India	A number of authors have written about India over the years, but not many are both empathetic and balanced. Dalrymple is one of the exceptions.
Travel/Philosophy/Mysticism	Peter Matthiessen	Snow Leopard