2024

1. The Woman In Me by Britney Spears (4/5)

This book was incredibly hard to read, just so sad :(

Fame is the worst double-edged sword ever

2. Living with a SEAL by Jesse Itzler (4.25/5)

I will never not love a David Goggins story

don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done

3. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (2.75/5)

All the hype for Breitweiser completely loses substance after he starts stealing just because he can’t control himself. Really throws out the entire “aesthetics are more important than ethics” theme that the author tries to sell.

What I liked about the book was the description of the artworks, and there is further reading material at the end of the book for people that are interested in literature about art.

4. The Virgin Way by Richard Branson (3/5)

Read this once, and write down the important stuff. Not too bad imo considering how much I loathe this genre.

5. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey (4/5)

Alright, alright, alright

It was super fun listening to this book. The writing is fantastic, I thought McConaughey used a ghostwriter. Superb stories, great lessons, and I learnt a lot. Greenlight.

6. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry (4.25/5)

How are you supposed to rate/review a man’s life?

This was ridiculously difficult to read, I can’t fathom how difficult it must have been to live. That is all I’m capable of saying about it.

The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir

7. Never Finished by David Goggins (3.75/5)

Look, when I first heard Goggins came out with an other book, I was convinced it was a publicity stunt, because how can you replicate Can’t Hurt Me? That book was iconic because it was authentic, will this be authentic? Or will it be another sub-par sophomore book by a famous personality that hit it big with their first book? With these doubts, I just wasn’t willing to read this one, but after completing Living with a SEAL, I wanted more Goggins’ stories.

This book is just as good as Can’t Hurt Me in all the places where Goggins is narrating episodes from his life. It falls flat in places where he’s not narrating and it’s just some advice that feels placed there to complete some word count. I can never get enough of his stories, never, and for this I rate the book very well. One-time read for sure.

8. The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan (3/5)

Super low effort writing, this. Could’ve been so much more. You do expect Percy to mature but not into a middle-aged man, which is what he sounds like in many places. The beloved Percy Jackson sarcasm has mellowed out, and only shows up a handful of times through the book. The ending is some of the weakest writing I’ve read in a long while, the chapter breaks are forced and pointless, just bad overall. Pains me to rate a Percy Jackson book anything but five stars.

Was this book just promo for the new series? Seems very much like that. The saving grace is that this is not another Cursed Child.

9. Impossible First by Colin O’Brady (3/5)

Should’ve been a blog post, or a series of blog posts at the most. Some parts of the book were very engaging, the rest were a slog. The writing lets the book down, did no editor read it before it was published?

10. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (4.75/5)

This book will forever be special to me, it opened my mind to the kind of stories I never thought were possible to write. Interpreter of Maladies was my first Jhumpa Lahiri book ever, it was assigned reading to me as part of an advanced english course in my first undergraduate semester and I couldn’t get enough of it, I think I read the book over and over again until I couldn’t savour the deliciousness of the writing anymore. Oh! How I wish I could read it again for the first time. It is also the book I gift the most, because everyone needs to read it :)

My favourite stories are Mrs. Sen’s (which was my assigned story!) and A Temporary Matter which is Lahiri at her best.

11. Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney (5/5)

five stars, no notes.

12. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (2.5/5)

Sure, I can see how this book is critically acclaimed in literature circles but Murakami has never appealed to me, and I don’t know why. The story never flows easily, and it feels very forced. Very confused.

13. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare (3/5)

I read this a decade ago for school and I’m mad how they made us read a sanitized version of the play. If I get the time, I’ll rant more about this and other themes I noticed in the play later.

14. The Red Headed League by Arthur Conan Doyle (3/5)

I was given a book containing this and the subsequent two Sherlock Holmes’ stories as a gift from the principal of my school after I gave her a full length book that I’d written. Everytime I read these stories, I’m reminded of how much help I’ve had from my teachers.

15. The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle (3/5)

See above review

16. The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Arthur Conan Doyle (3/5)

See above review

17. Normal People by Sally Rooney (3.75/5)

I want to write like this

18. The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans (3.75/5)

great book, I felt it was more of an academic text at times but it was very illuminating.

A Blueprint for Dismantling Society.

19. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (2.75/5)

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…

I thought the book started way too slow, and never came to the point. Rebecca was introduced very well, but everything else was a slog. Things get interesting after Danvers starts antagonizing the new bride, and my reading pace ramped up right until the final twist. Very well done.

The main character is super neurotic, and that did not endear me to her at all. Imagine this book if she didn’t overthink everything. But then I guess it’s only natural, so I wont judge.

20. The Third Reich in Power by Richard Evans (4/5)

Great book, very very well written

Not very entertaining, but that’s not the point of the book. At times it felt like something was wrong with me for subjecting myself to this 40 hour plus history lecture but it was worth it. I would love to have physical copies of the trilogy to use as reference material.

21. The Third Reich at War by Richard Evans (4.5/5)

First of all, I am super relieved that this trilogy is done. Reading these books was really hard, and very taxing on my brain. While the third part was, relatively, the easiest to digest, it was still very much academic. However, that is not a criticism of the book, but more an admission of my shortcomings when it comes to reading nonfiction. I already DNF’d The Great Terror last year so I didn’t want to make it a habit and I slogged through.

I would say the effort pays off. You learn so much more when you pay attention to how all the different threads in the late Third Reich stem from and end in Hitler’s fanatical obsession with eliminating the Jews of Europe. At times, you wonder why they didn’t just shake off this obvious disadvantage they were saddling themselves with (the logistics and energy needed to conduct the Holocaust). But without this fundamental stupidity, Hitler and the Nazis would have been just another bunch of rabble-rousers.

I read William Shirer’s famous Rise and Fall of the Third Reich a few years ago and I even have it on my books-that-everyone-must-read list but even that massive tome feels like popular history compared to Evans’ work. Richard Evans does a brilliant job in making it clear, and then underlining, the fact that no German accidentally found themselves in the middle of the Third Reich. Each and every one of them actively contributed to its establishment, continuation, and maintenance.

As far as this book goes, Nazi Germany goes to war, and wipes out entire generations of European men. The tide of the Nazi storm seemed unstoppable until it crashed against the Soviet breakwater at Stalingrad. Rule number one in the art of war is to never march on Moscow. The Soviets were always winning what was now a war of attrition, and the Ostfront becomes horribly bloody and inhuman. The Holocaust is in full swing, and reading those chapters make you sick to your stomach.

There are narrations of Nazi era jokes sprinkled throughout the book and the rest of the contents of the book are so dark that these jokes provide much needed comic relief. So much so that they need not even be particularly funny. One peeve I have with the trilogy is how Evans doesn’t use German words for organizations and official posts and stuff. This made it annoying for me to search for them while I was reading.

Definitely the best, overtakes Shirer’s work in my opinion for factual correctness, sensitivity, and intellectual comprehensiveness.

22. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer (5/5)

One of the best books I’ve ever read. The writing has so much personality.

23. Lenin by Victor Sebestyen (5/5)

Just as gripping and unputdownable as the first time I read it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

24. From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun (3/5)

Very comprehensive, very illuminating, took me a long time to finish. I collected a bunch of quotes that I really enjoyed reading…

“Perform the acts of faith and faith will come”, by Ignatius of Loyola

Science has cut Man down to size and broken his pride: Copernicus removed him from the center of the universe; Darwin reduced him to the status of animal; and Jung dethroned his intellect and put instinct in its place

The importance attached to Time in the West is a distinctive trait: Swift’s Gulliver looks at his watch so often that his hosts the Brobdingnagians think he is consulting his god

As Goethe’s Faust says at the start of his adventure, ‘In the beginning was not the Word, but the Act.’ The Word—an abstraction—comes after.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rank with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and it is hard to think of a third partnership of equal renown. Indeed, in a fundamental sense they are the same pair, bent on a similar quest but in a different costume, 300 years apart

Finding oneself is a misnomer. A self is not found but made

25. The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (5/5)

The writing is so powerful, a must read. The first time I read it, I think I was too overwhelmed by all the information thrown at me, but this time, I appreciated the writing too. You cannot narrate a story with this much weight AND keep the reader hooked without being a literary genius.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

26. The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (5/5)

While the first volume is far more entertaining to read, this is the volume that is more important to read. I went through chapter multiple times because of how much wisdom was compressed in each story. I think I finally understand why the book is subtitled, “An Experiment in Literary Investigation.”

The Fan Fanych essay is the best part, other honourable mentions go to descriptions of the stool pigeons, the camp guards, the kids in camp, and what camp does to people’s psychology.

27. Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer (4.5/5)

this was strangely motivational, i wish it were a much longer story. i am going to go and draw

28. Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer (4.5/5)

i simply had to go read another naomi kritzer story and this did not disappoint. midway, i realized that the theme was how you need to care for yourself as if you were caring for another person.

29. The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 3 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (5/5)

this entire work is a very very important piece of literature in history, i hope to return to it many more times

30. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (3.5/5)

cowardice is the most terrible of vices

when I first started reading this, I didn’t really know about how the book is a well-acclaimed in literary circles for its satirical take on Soviet life. Coming from finishing the Gulag Archipelago, I wanted some light fiction, and I wow, my choice could not have been more ironic. With that in mind, I struggled with the writing initially, reading the first chapter four times before I got comfortable with the style.

It is not the most accessible of prose, but there is a switch midway when everything beings to click and then reading becomes effortless. The Pontius Pilate arc is simply wonderful, I can’t say enough about this, I would love to read that as a standalone novel. There is a shooting scene between a cat hanging from a chandelier and the police, which is written so well that I wanted to copy down the words carefully.

Obviously, the Soviet satire pops up very quickly, and my P&V translation already had a lot of footnotes to nudge me along that direction. The secret police, the sudden disappearances, unexplained misfortunes, the insistence on documentation, the blatant corruption, the slow moving bureaucracy, “manuscripts don’t burn” among others.

Sometimes things don’t make sense, but I don’t think they take away anything from the overall story. But you want to impatiently get over some obviously unnecessary fantastical elements or descriptions. I, for one, didn’t really get what the whole thing with the ball was. I haven’t read Goethe’s Faust, so I couldn’t really appreciate that angle, but I gather that it has something to do with making a deal with the devil. Also, this should’ve had a better title, that focused on Woland, neither the Master nor Margarita are particularly impressive in my opinion.

I would not recommend reading this book like a critic/lit-major would, but rather, read it like a child would, a fairytale from the shelf of the school library.

31. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (4.5/5)

The writing is other-worldly. One of those books where the dialogue pales in comparison to the descriptions. I read it once, then did it again. What an experience!

32. To Build a Fire by Jack London (2.75/5)

ehh, it ain’t bad, but I didn’t get what the hype was all about. I too came from that YouTube video about fear of cold or something. Both the video and the book were a waste of time.

33. Genius by James Gleick (5/5)

Feynman will forever be the benchmark I measure myself against

34. Gilgamesh translated by Stephen Mitchell (4.5/5)

There is nothing I can say about this epic that hasn’t been said before. I mean, this story is more than four millenia old and has lasted through wars and famines and much more. I am not going to review this and pretend I am above it all. I liked the recurring theme of sleep and death. I liked the portrayal of Gilgamesh’s grief at Enkidu’s death, and the hero journey in his search for immortality. The mother of all hero stories. Cannot complain. I wish it were longer though.

35. The Best Short Stories 2023 edited by Lauren Groff (3.75/5)

finally finished this, very slow by my standards but I am glad I got through it, I think the short story format is very enjoyable only if you accept that it will end. I spent too much time thinking about each story and didn’t want to start the next ones.

stories I really liked were:

• Man Mountain, Catherine Lacey
• The Complete, Gabriel Smith
• Xifu, K-Ming Chang

stories I absolutely did not like (and which contributed to me avoiding the book for weeks) were:

• ‘Me, Rory and Aurora’, Jonas Eika
• Elision, David Ryan
• Temporary Housing, Kathleen Alcott

36. Spurious Correlations by Tyler Vigen (3/5)

hilarious, the “headlines”, stuff in the footnotes, the graphs, hilarious.

37. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (5/5)

It has been a long time since a book has consumed me thus. The best book I’ve read this year.

38. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1/5)

this book is just the protagonist introducing people to the reader, what a waste of time. i resolved at a very young age to never read dickens after suffering through a tale of two cities, and i shouldn’t have changed my mind.

39. The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond (2.5/5)

short, quaint, and nice

40. Genghis Khan by Frank McLynn (2/5)

“I am the flail of god. Had you not committed great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”

Genghis Khan’s response to the Khwarazmian Empire that killed his diplomats. Over ten million of their people would be butchered by the Mongols in the next two years

I started reading this two seasons ago and stopped because I couldn’t visualize all the places in my head without a map of China in front of me at all times. It’s not a great book compared to the historical biographies I read. Feels like a hastily written draft rather than a finished product. There are attempts to perform the usual historical-biography flourishes, like ending chapters with an enigmatic sentence and whatnot, but they are so half-hearted that they’re more cringey than hair-raising.

Also, what was up with the chapter on Genghis’ death? The entire event was written like an afterthought. I was very confused, thinking I missed a couple of pages or something. Anyway, I’ll end with a badass anecdote from Hulagu’s sack of Baghdad.

“A sober estimate of the fatalities in the siege and sack of Baghdad provides a tally of 90,000 dead… It was said that so many books were thrown into the Tigris that the river, previously red with blood, now turned black with ink and remained that way for several days.”

Hulagu imprisoned the Caliph and brought him a plate full of gold, meaning him to eat it. The Caliph replied,

“It is not edible”

“Then why did you keep it? Why did you not use it to pay your soldiers?”, asked Hulagu

“It was the will of God”, replied the Caliph

“What will happen to you now,” said Hulagu, “is also God’s will”

41. Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikotter (2/5)

the first paragraph of the preface was more than enough:

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years.

By unleashing China’s greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would ‘walk on two legs’: the peasant masses were mobilised to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all.

In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism. People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food, distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the party’s every dictate.

Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.

42. A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (2/5)

more like a history of the “western” world in 6 glasses (with additional focus on how britain is heaven’s gift to mankind)

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