Favourite Books

A lot of people ask me what my favourite books are, or what books I would recommend to them. The purpose of this page is to provide a diversion to the question so I can sneak away before they figure out I dodged the question. These are a few of my all-time favourite reads, and books that got a spot on this list are those that I loved on first read. The fiction category is sorted by the order in which I read the books, but the non-fiction and academic section are random. I like to think I read everything apart from self-help, although I notice that I don’t like horror, and look down on science-fiction. There aren’t any super-niche books on this list because I very rarely stray from mainstream bestsellers that have stood the test of time. I don’t know if I would recommend any of these books. I think I would actually discourage people from reading a few of these, and there are many books that I would recommend that are not on this list because I didn’t like the reading experience. The academic section was a very last minute addition, I didn’t know if you consider that “reading” and I definitely did not read all those books cover to cover. But those are books that have kept me company for a very long time, and taught me so much, that it is only fair that I put them here.

Fiction

• The Ramayana by Valmiki
• The Mahabharata by Vyasa
• The Iliad by Homer
• The Odyssey by Homer
• Famous Five series by Enid Blyton
• The Naughtiest Girl series by Enid Blyton
• Mythos by Stephen Fry
• Heroes by Stephen Fry
• Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney
• Inferno by Dan Brown
• Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
• Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer
• A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
• As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
• Normal People by Sally Rooney
• Don Quixote by Cervantes
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• White Fang by Jack London
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Non-fiction

• Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman
• Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman
• Napoleon by Andrew Roberts
• Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
• Genius by James Gleick
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
• The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
• Lenin by Victor Sebestyen
• The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Complications by Atul Gawande
• This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
• The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
• Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
• Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins
• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
• Open by Andre Agassi
• Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Academic

• Linear Algebra by Serge Lang
• A First Course in Probability by Sheldon Ross
• Calculus by Michael Spivak
• Elementary Introduction to Number Theory by Calvin Long
• Concepts of Physics by H. C. Verma
• Gravitation by Misner and Thorpe
• Fluid Mechanics by Landau and Lifshitz
• Introduction to Electrodynamics by David Griffiths
• Finite Element Procedures by Klaus-Jurgen Bathe
• Stochastic Calculus for Finance by Steven Shreve
• Option Volatility and Pricing by Sheldon Natenberg
• Options, Futures, and Derivatives by John Hull
• C Programming by K. N. King
• The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena
• Dynamic Programming by Art Lew
• Introduction to Statistical Learning by James et al.
• Reinforcement Learning by Sutton and Barto
• Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser
• Operating Systems Three Easy Pieces by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau
• 100 Endgames You Must Know by Jesus de la Villa