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. Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
3. Beach Read — Emily Henry
4. Building a Second Brain — Tiago Forte
5. Butter — Asako Yuzuki
6. Cleopatra and Frankenstein — Coco Mellors
7. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. Cultural Amnesia — Clive James
9. Cursed Bunny — Bora Chung
10. Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh — Shrayana Bhattacharya
11. East of Eden — John Steinbeck
12. Emma — Jane Austen
13. Essence of Indian Art — B. N. Goswamy
14. Everything I Know About Love — Dolly Alderton finished
15. Fool Me Twice — Nona Uppal finished
16. Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin
17. Girl Made of Gold — Gitanjali Kolanad
18. Give and Take — Adam Grant
19. How the World Really Works — Vaclav Smil
20. How to Kill Men and Get Away With It — Katy Brent finished
21. How to Take Smart Notes — Sönke Ahrens
22. Hurda — Atharva Pandit
23. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden — Joanne Greenberg
24. If on a winter's night a traveller — Italo Calvino
25. Interpreter of Maladies — Jhumpa Lahiri
26. Invention: A Life — James Dyson
27. Lady Doctors — Kavitha Rao
28. Latitudes of Longing — Shubhangi Swarup
29. Lust for Life — Irving Stone
30. Luv (Un)Arranged — N. M. Patel finished
31. Mansfield Park — Jane Austen
32. Metamorphosis and Other Stories — Franz Kafka
33. Mother India — Prayaag Akbar finished
34. Mottled Dawn — Saadat Hasan Manto
35. My Seditious Heart — Arundhati Roy
36. No Place to Call My Own — Alina Gufran
37. Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen
38. Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky
39. Novelist as a Vocation — Haruki Murakami
40. Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck
41. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous — Ocean Vuong
42. On Writing — Charles Bukowski
43. Persuasion — Jane Austen
44. Pnin — Vladimir Nabokov
45. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
46. Read Write Own — Chris Dixon
47. Real Estate: Living Autobiography 3 — Deborah Levy
48. Sakina’s Kiss — Vivek Shanbhag
49. Sati Series — Koral Dasgupta
50. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting — Syd Field
51. Selected Works — Franz Kafka
52. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen
53. Show Your Work! — Austin Kleon
54. Stubborn Attachments — Tyler Cowen
55. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity — Amartya Sen
56. The Art of Noticing — Rob Walker
57. The Artist's Way — Julia Cameron
58. The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath
59. The Best of Tagore — Rabindranath Tagore
60. The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa
61. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
62. The Castle — Franz Kafka
63. The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Volume 1: Poona and Bombay — Saadat Hasan Manto
64. The Cost of Living: Living Autobiography 2 — Deborah Levy
65. The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin finished
66. The Diaries of Franz Kafka — Franz Kafka
67. The Girl Who Knew Too Much — Vikrant Khanna finished
68. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
69. The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. The Infinite Game — Simon Sinek
71. The Jackfruit Chronicles: Memories and Recipes from a British-Bangladeshi Kitchen — Shahnaz Ahsan
72. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny — Kiran Desai
73. The Making of Prince of Persia — Jordan Mechner
74. The Midnight Library — Matt Haig finished
75. The Origins of Efficiency — Brian Potter
76. The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1 — The Paris Review
77. The Pearl — John Steinbeck
78. The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde
79. The Poppy War Trilogy — R. F. Kuang
80. The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium — Martin Gurri
81. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World — Peter Frankopan
82. The Society of the Spectacle — Guy Debord
83. The Stories of John Cheever — John Cheever
84. The Trial — Franz Kafka
85. The Vegetarian — Han Kang
86. Things I Don't Want to Know: Living Autobiography 1 — Deborah Levy
87. Train to Pakistan — Khushwant Singh
88. Unboxing Bengaluru: The City of New Beginnings — Malini Goyal, Prashanth Prakash
89. Whole Numbers and Half Truths — Rukmini S
90. Why the Poor Don't Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians — Manu Joseph
91. Why We're Polarized — Ezra Klein
92. Yellowface — R. F. Kuang finished

Textbooks #

1. A Philosophy of Software Design — John Ousterhout
2. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management — Will Larson
3. Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) — Sebastian Raschka
4. Crafting Interpreters — Robert Nystrom
5. Database Internals — Alex Petrov
6. Database System Concepts — Abraham Silberschatz, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan
7. Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing — Jared Bhatti, Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nuñez, Heidi Waterhouse
8. Effective Software Testing — Maurício Aniche
9. Engineering Management for the Rest of Us — Sarah Drasner
10. Foundations of Databases — Serge Abiteboul, Richard Hull, Victor Vianu
11. Fundamentals of Software Architecture — Mark Richards, Neal Ford
12. Grokking Streaming Systems — Josh Fischer, Ning Wang
13. Introduction to Information Retrieval — Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, Hinrich Schütze
14. Linear Algebra and Its Applications (4th edition) — Gilbert Strang
15. Operating System Concepts — Abraham Silberschatz, Peter B. Galvin, Greg Gagne
16. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces — Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau
17. Podman in Action — Daniel J. Walsh
18. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd edition) — Richard S. Sutton, Andrew G. Barto
19. Relevant Search — Doug Turnbull, John Berryman
20. Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice — Mara Bos
21. Rust for Rustaceans: Idiomatic Programming for Experienced Developers — Jon Gjengset
22. Software Architecture: The Hard Parts — Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage, Zhamak Dehghani
23. Software Engineering at Google — Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright
24. Systems Performance — Brendan Gregg
25. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn — Richard W. Hamming
26. The Future of Text, Vol. 1 — Frode Hegland (editor)
27. The Rust Programming Language — Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols
28. The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 — Dwarkesh Patel
29. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook — Gergely Orosz
30. The Staff Engineer's Path — Tanya Reilly
31. Understanding Software Dynamics — Richard L. Sites
32. Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns — Vladimir Khorikov