1. Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
  2. The Message, Ta Na Hesi Coates
  3. Concise Guide to Macroeconomics, David Moss
  4. Stay True, Hua Hsu
  5. In Light of What We Know, Zia Haider Rahman
  6. Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder

Books

Also see: Books I read in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020

High recommended books in bold

  1. Animal Liberation Now, Peter Singer: This book is in the canon of modern animal welfare and I was very late in my own journey of animal welfare in reading it. As a result I had already imbibed a lot of its arguments on the suffering of non-human animals and scale of factory farming in the West and didn’t see my world turn upside down. However, if you find yourself thinking “what is this whole veganism thing about,” I strongly recommend starting here.
  2. Indigo: Collected Short Stories, Satyajit Ray
  3. Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges: I wish I spent 6 months reading these stories because each one had so much to savour. Like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, much of the story is in the reader’s mind, not on the page.
  4. Parliamental, Meghnad S
  5. Sita’s Liberation, Volga: I have long been obsessed with retellings of Sita’s story from the Ramayana, which to me has effectively rendered the story a tragedy. The rendition of the Ramayana I was told as a kid conveniently ended with Diwali and the return to Ayodhya. The ‘epilogue’, which covers Sita’s tragic life of accusations and exile, is rarely addressed. In this short novela, Volga depicts interactions between Sita and the women of Ramayana from a feminist perspective. I particularly appreciated the chapter on Surpanakha, which shares her perspective as a victim of harassment by the brothers, not an evil demonness. (I have also been thinking about Ramayana’s ethnic allusions about Raavan and Lanka. Recommendations welcome!)
  6. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, Frans de Waal [audiobook]
  7. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks [audiobook]
  8. The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India, Mansi Choksi: In the vein of The Ferment and Dreamers, a deeply reported book following couples who go beyond the confines of arranged marriage to seek ‘forbidden loves’ across caste, religion, and gender.
  9. Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kar: I read this book in preparation for a school trip to Kinshasa, DRC and was in turns stunned and gutted. Kar has done extraordinary journalism to uncover the supply chains that turn cobalt mined with modern day slave labor into our smartphones. He travels into the depths of Lumumbashi (which I was not able to visit) to report on labor conditions that seem fit for the 18th century, Chinese / US conglomerates, and the political instability surrounding the most resource rich region of the world. Mandatory reading for anyone with a digital device today.