Books and textbooks I’ve picked up, am reading, or have finished. A list, with the occasional note.¹

Books #

1. A Burglar's Guide to the City — Geoff Manaugh
2. All About Love — bell hooks
3. All Fours — Miranda July
4. Amp It Up — Frank Slootman
5. Arrangements in Blue — Amy Key
6. Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
7. Babel — R. F. Kuang
8. Bangalore Blues — Kirtana Kumar
9. Bangalore Through the Centuries — M. Fazlul Hasan
10. Bangkok Wakes to Rain — Pitchaya Sudbanthad
11. Beach Read — Emily Henry
12. Becoming — Michelle Obama
13. Behave — Robert M. Sapolsky
14. Breaking the Mould — Raghuram G. Rajan, Rohit Lamba
15. Building a Second Brain — Tiago Forte
16. Butter — Asako Yuzuki
17. Cleopatra and Frankenstein — Coco Mellors
18. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
19. Cultural Amnesia — Clive James
20. Cursed Bunny — Bora Chung
21. Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh — Shrayana Bhattacharya
22. Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia — S. Hussain Zaidi
23. Dune — Frank Herbert
24. East of Eden — John Steinbeck
25. Emma — Jane Austen
26. Emperor of Rome — Mary Beard
27. Essence of Indian Art — B. N. Goswamy
28. Everything I Know About Love — Dolly Alderton finished
29. Flashlight — Susan Choi
30. Fool Me Twice — Nona Uppal finished
31. For the Love of Physics — Walter Lewin
32. Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin
33. Girl Made of Gold — Gitanjali Kolanad
34. Give and Take — Adam Grant
35. Gods, Guns and Missionaries — Manu S. Pillai
36. Good to Great — Jim Collins
37. H-Pop — Kunal Purohit
38. Hamnet — Maggie O'Farrell
39. Hit Refresh — Satya Nadella
40. Home — Marilynne Robinson
41. Homo Deus — Yuval Noah Harari
42. How the World Really Works — Vaclav Smil
43. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster — Bill Gates
44. How to Kill Men and Get Away With It — Katy Brent finished
45. How to Raise an Adult — Julie Lythcott-Haims
46. How to Take Smart Notes — Sönke Ahrens
47. Humble Pie — Gordon Ramsay
48. Hurda — Atharva Pandit
49. I Do What I Do — Raghuram G. Rajan
50. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden — Joanne Greenberg
51. If on a winter's night a traveller — Italo Calvino
52. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
53. Interpreter of Maladies — Jhumpa Lahiri
54. Invention: A Life — James Dyson
55. Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata — Devdutt Pattanaik
56. Katabasis — R. F. Kuang
57. Kitchen Confidential — Anthony Bourdain
58. Lady Doctors — Kavitha Rao
59. Latitudes of Longing — Shubhangi Swarup
60. Lust for Life — Irving Stone
61. Luv (Un)Arranged — N. M. Patel finished
62. Mansfield Park — Jane Austen
63. Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
64. Metamorphosis and Other Stories — Franz Kafka
65. Mother India — Prayaag Akbar finished
66. Mottled Dawn — Saadat Hasan Manto
67. My Friends — Hisham Matar
68. My Seditious Heart — Arundhati Roy
69. No Bad Parts — Richard C. Schwartz
70. No Longer Human — Osamu Dazai
71. No Place to Call My Own — Alina Gufran
72. Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen
73. Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky
74. Novelist as a Vocation — Haruki Murakami
75. Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck
76. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous — Ocean Vuong
77. On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin
78. On Writing — Charles Bukowski
79. Permanent Record — Edward Snowden
80. Persepolis — Marjane Satrapi
81. Persuasion — Jane Austen
82. Pnin — Vladimir Nabokov
83. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
84. Principles — Ray Dalio
85. Prophet Song — Paul Lynch
86. Read Write Own — Chris Dixon
87. Real Estate: Living Autobiography 3 — Deborah Levy
88. Sakina's Kiss — Vivek Shanbhag
89. Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari
90. Sati Series — Koral Dasgupta
91. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting — Syd Field
92. Selected Works — Franz Kafka
93. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen
94. Show Your Work! — Austin Kleon
95. Stubborn Attachments — Tyler Cowen
96. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity — Amartya Sen
97. The Art of Noticing — Rob Walker
98. The Art of the Personal Essay — Phillip Lopate
99. The Artist's Way — Julia Cameron
100. The Barbary Coast — Herbert Asbury
101. The Battle of Belonging — Shashi Tharoor
102. The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath
103. The Best of Tagore — Rabindranath Tagore
104. The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth — Veeraporn Nitiprapha
105. The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa
106. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
107. The Castle — Franz Kafka
108. The Catcher in the Rye — J. D. Salinger
109. The City and Its Uncertain Walls — Haruki Murakami
110. The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Volume 1: Poona and Bombay — Saadat Hasan Manto
111. The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran — Kahlil Gibran
112. The Cooking of Books — Ramachandra Guha
113. The Cost of Living: Living Autobiography 2 — Deborah Levy
114. The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
115. The Covenant of Water — Abraham Verghese
116. The Coworker — Freida McFadden
117. The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin finished
118. The Diaries of Franz Kafka — Franz Kafka
119. The Fever — Sonia Faleiro
120. The Girl Who Knew Too Much — Vikrant Khanna finished
121. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
122. The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky
123. The Infinite Game — Simon Sinek
124. The Jackfruit Chronicles: Memories and Recipes from a British-Bangladeshi Kitchen — Shahnaz Ahsan
125. The Lion and the Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh — Ira Mukhoty
126. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny — Kiran Desai
127. The Making of Prince of Persia — Jordan Mechner
128. The Midnight Library — Matt Haig finished
129. The Origins of Efficiency — Brian Potter
130. The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1 — The Paris Review
131. The Pearl — John Steinbeck
132. The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde
133. The Poppy War Trilogy — R. F. Kuang
134. The Quran — Traditional
135. The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium — Martin Gurri
136. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World — Peter Frankopan
137. The Society of the Spectacle — Guy Debord
138. The Stories of John Cheever — John Cheever
139. The Story of Art — E. H. Gombrich
140. The Third Pillar — Raghuram G. Rajan
141. The Trial — Franz Kafka
142. The Vegetarian — Han Kang
143. Things I Don't Want to Know: Living Autobiography 1 — Deborah Levy
144. Tom Lake — Ann Patchett
145. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin
146. Train to Pakistan — Khushwant Singh
147. Unboxing Bengaluru: The City of New Beginnings — Malini Goyal, Prashanth Prakash
148. Unsealed Covers — Gautam Bhatia
149. Victory City — Salman Rushdie
150. Whole Numbers and Half Truths — Rukmini S
151. Why the Poor Don't Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians — Manu Joseph
152. Why We're Polarized — Ezra Klein
153. Yellowface — R. F. Kuang finished

Textbooks #

1. A Philosophy of Software Design — John Ousterhout
2. AI Engineering — Chip Huyen
3. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management — Will Larson
4. An Introduction to Probability and Statistics — Vijay K. Rohatgi, A. K. Md. Ehsanes Saleh
5. An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications — William Feller
6. Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide — Tomer Shiran, Jason Hughes, Alex Merced
7. Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) — Sebastian Raschka
8. Computer Networks: A Top-Down Approach — Behrouz A. Forouzan, Firouz Mosharraf
9. Computer Organization — Carl Hamacher, Zvonko Vranesic, Safwat Zaky
10. Crafting Interpreters — Robert Nystrom
11. Database Internals — Alex Petrov
12. Database System Concepts — Abraham Silberschatz, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan
13. Deep Learning — Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville
14. Docs for Developers: An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing — Jared Bhatti, Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nunez, Heidi Waterhouse
15. Effective Software Testing — Mauricio Aniche
16. Engineering Management for the Rest of Us — Sarah Drasner
17. Foundations of Databases — Serge Abiteboul, Richard Hull, Victor Vianu
18. Fundamentals of Computer Algorithms — Ellis Horowitz, Sartaj Sahni, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran
19. Fundamentals of Data Engineering — Joe Reis, Matt Housley
20. Fundamentals of Database Systems — Ramez Elmasri, Shamkant B. Navathe
21. Fundamentals of Software Architecture — Mark Richards, Neal Ford
22. Grokking Streaming Systems — Josh Fischer, Ning Wang
23. Introduction to Algorithms — Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein
24. Introduction to Information Retrieval — Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, Hinrich Schutze
25. Learning Dapr — Haishi Bai, Yaron Schneider
26. Learning eBPF — Liz Rice
27. Linear Algebra and Its Applications (4th edition) — Gilbert Strang
28. Modern Operating Systems — Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Herbert Bos
29. Operating System Concepts — Abraham Silberschatz, Peter B. Galvin, Greg Gagne
30. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces — Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau
31. Patterns of Distributed Systems — Unmesh Joshi
32. Podman in Action — Daniel J. Walsh
33. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd edition) — Richard S. Sutton, Andrew G. Barto
34. Relevant Search — Doug Turnbull, John Berryman
35. Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice — Mara Bos
36. Rust for Rustaceans: Idiomatic Programming for Experienced Developers — Jon Gjengset
37. Software Architecture: The Hard Parts — Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage, Zhamak Dehghani
38. Software Engineering at Google — Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright
39. Systems Performance — Brendan Gregg
40. The Annotated Turing — Charles Petzold
41. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn — Richard W. Hamming
42. The Essence of Compilers — Robin Hunter
43. The Future of Text, Vol. 1 — Frode Hegland (editor)
44. The Rust Programming Language — Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols
45. The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 — Dwarkesh Patel
46. The Software Engineer's Guidebook — Gergely Orosz
47. The Staff Engineer's Path — Tanya Reilly
48. Understanding Software Dynamics — Richard L. Sites
49. Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns — Vladimir Khorikov