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.
I have a list of my favourite words here.
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
Stephen Fry's Great Mythology Series
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney
Angels & Demons 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
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Stoner by John Williams
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
The Story of Civilization series by Will Durant
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
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
Galois' Dream by Michio Kuga
The Princeton Guide to Mathematics, edited by Timothy Gowers
Concepts of Physics by H. C. Verma
Gravitation by Misner and Thorne
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
Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry, 31st Edition by Rodwell et al.
Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision by Hartley and Zisserman
An Invitation to 3-D Vision by Ma et al.