Legere Ergo Sum

Reading now

• The Guns of August — Barbara W. Tuchman
• The Silk Roads — Peter Frankopan

All-time favourites ✨

• The Three-Body Problem trilogy — Liu Cixin ✨✨✨✨
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! — Richard P. Feynman ✨✨✨✨ // companion for life
• The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ✨✨✨ // what is essential is invisible to the eye
• The Tao of Pooh, The Te of Piglet — Benjamin Hoff ✨✨✨
• Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir ✨✨
• Mistborn trilogy — Brandon Sanderson ✨✨ // college bucket-list item “one full Sanderson series” — done, May–Jul 2026
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series — Douglas Adams ✨✨ // “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”
• Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl ✨
• Foundation series — Isaac Asimov ✨

2026 · 11 so far — the non-fiction season

Non-fiction

• Prisoners of Geography — Tim Marshall
• The Argumentative Indian — Amartya Sen
• India After Gandhi — Ramachandra Guha

Fiction

• The Hero of Ages (Mistborn #3) — Brandon Sanderson ✨✨ // genuine end-of-series hangover
• The Well of Ascension (Mistborn #2) — Brandon Sanderson
• The Final Empire (Mistborn #1) — Brandon Sanderson ✨✨
• Guilt — Keigo Higashino // pre-ordered, read in a day
• A Short Stay in Hell — Steven L. Peck
• Tender Is the Flesh — Agustina Bazterrica
• The Clock House Murders (House Murders #4) — Yukito Ayatsuji
• Ibnebatuti — Divya Prakash Dubey // Hindi
• Shadows Revealed (Celestial Chronicles #2)

2025 · peak year — 23 finished, 9 in March alone

Non-fiction

• Akbar: The Great Mughal — Ira Mukhoty
• Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth — Audrey Truschke
• The Rebel — Albert Camus
• The Algorithm Design Manual — Steven Skiena

Fiction

• Buddha, Vols. 1–8 — Osamu Tezuka // the whole manga epic in one March sprint
• The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Millennium #2–3) — Stieg Larsson
• The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6) — Dan Brown
• The Labyrinth House Murders (House Murders #3) — Yukito Ayatsuji
• Ready Player One & Ready Player Two — Ernest Cline
• The Andromeda Strain — Michael Crichton
• Invisible Helix (Detective Galileo #5) — Keigo Higashino
• Journey Under the Midnight Sun — Keigo Higashino
• Red Rising — Pierce Brown
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Hercule Poirot #1) — Agatha Christie
• Shadows Rising (Celestial Chronicles #1)
• Rick and Morty, Vol. 1 — Zac Gorman

2024

• The Three-Body Problem trilogy — Liu Cixin ✨✨✨✨
• Babel — R.F. Kuang
• A Death in Tokyo (Detective Kaga #3) — Keigo Higashino
• Yellowface — R.F. Kuang
• Dept. of Speculation — Jenny Offill

2023 · the year of Japanese mysteries & sci-fi

• Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir ✨✨
• Stories of Your Life and Others — Ted Chiang
• Dark Matter — Blake Crouch
• Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
• The Midnight Library — Matt Haig
• A Tale for the Time Being — Ruth Ozeki
• Of Ants and Dinosaurs — Liu Cixin
• Silent Parade, Salvation of a Saint, A Midsummer’s Equation (Detective Galileo #2–4) — Keigo Higashino
• Naoko — Keigo Higashino
• The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping — Keigo Higashino

2020–2022 · COVID reading

Fiction

• The Martian — Andy Weir // binged as an audiobook in one week of gym
• Harry Potter series — J.K. Rowling ✨✨ // reading count = 4; thanks COVID-19 for too much free time
• Sphere — Michael Crichton
• Lord of the Flies — William Golding
• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions — Edwin Abbott Abbott
• Under the Dome — Stephen King
• The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
• The Krishna Key — Ashwin Sanghi

Non-fiction

• Thing Explainer — Randall Munroe
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — Yuval Noah Harari ✨✨
• Sophie’s World — Jostein Gaarder ✨✨
• The Stranger — Albert Camus
• The God Delusion — Richard Dawkins ✨
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil deGrasse Tyson
• The Road to Reality — Roger Penrose
• Time Travel: A History — James Gleick
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert M. Pirsig
• The Story of Philosophy — Will Durant
• The Philosopher’s Toolkit — Julian Baggini
• Plato: Five Dialogues — Plato
• Reasons and Persons — Derek Parfit
• Dropping Ashes on the Buddha — Stephen Mitchell
• Why I am a Hindu — Shashi Tharoor
• Zero to One — Peter Thiel
• The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick
• Obviously Awesome — April Dunford
• The Art of Always Being Right — Arthur Schopenhauer
• Leonardo da Vinci — Walter Isaacson
• Trust Me, I’m Lying — Ryan Holiday
• Let’s Go! — Alex Edwards
• Unf*ck Yourself — Gary John Bishop // DNF’d — faith in self-help’s pretentiousness restored

2019 & college years

Fiction

• The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ✨✨✨ // what is essential is invisible to the eye
• Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
• Looking for Alaska — John Green
• Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
• Shiva Trilogy — Amish Tripathi
• Scion of Ikshvaku, Ram series — Amish Tripathi
• 11/22/63 — Stephen King ✨✨
• Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Airframe, Congo, Micro — Michael Crichton
• And Then There Were None — Agatha Christie

Non-fiction

• The Tao of Pooh, The Te of Piglet — Benjamin Hoff ✨✨✨
• Sapiens, Homo Deus — Yuval Noah Harari ✨✨
• What If? — Randall Munroe ✨
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck — Mark Manson
• The Art of War — Sun Tzu
• Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl ✨

School years & before

Non-fiction

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, What Do You Care What Other People Think? — Richard P. Feynman ✨✨✨✨ // companion for life
• The Bhagavadgita, The Principal Upanishads — Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan ✨✨
• Ashtavakra Gita
• Rigveda // technically this makes me 1vedi
• Wings of Fire — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam ✨
• The Prophet — Kahlil Gibran
• The Man Who Knew Infinity — Robert Kanigel
• A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking
• The Discovery of India — Jawaharlal Nehru
• The Indian War of Independence — Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
• My Experiments with Truth — M.K. Gandhi
• Benjamin Franklin — Walter Isaacson // polyphasic sleep is a fun experiment
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad — Robert T. Kiyosaki
• Gandhi: An Autobiography
• Introduction to Algorithms — T.H. Cormen

Fiction

• The Devotion of Suspect X — Keigo Higashino // the gateway drug into Japanese mysteries
• Malice, Newcomer, The Final Curtain (Detective Kaga #1–2, #4) — Keigo Higashino
• The Miracles of the Namiya General Store — Keigo Higashino
• Confessions, Penance — Kanae Minato
• The Aosawa Murders — Riku Onda
• The Decagon House Murders (House Murders #1) — Yukito Ayatsuji
• Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, After Dark, Dance Dance Dance — Haruki Murakami
• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop — Satoshi Yagisawa
• The Redemption of Time, The Supernova Era, Ball Lightning — Liu Cixin
• Recursion, Upgrade — Blake Crouch
• The Running Man, The Long Walk — Stephen King
• Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The A.B.C. Murders, Death in the Clouds — Agatha Christie
• A Study in Scarlet, A Scandal in Bohemia — Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1) — Stieg Larsson
• 1984, Animal Farm — George Orwell
• Flowers for Algernon — Daniel Keyes
• The Book Thief — Markus Zusak
• Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn
• American Gods — Neil Gaiman
• The Trial — Franz Kafka
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series — Douglas Adams ✨✨
• The Alchemist, Veronika Decides to Die, Brida, The Witch of Portobello — Paulo Coelho ✨✨
• The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, The Lost Symbol, Digital Fortress, Deception Point, Inferno, Origin — Dan Brown // my go-to guilty-pleasure books
• Foundation series — Isaac Asimov ✨
• Train to Pakistan — Khushwant Singh ✨✨
• Malgudi Days — R.K. Narayan
• All works of Jules Verne
• The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds — H.G. Wells
• The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank
• The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway
• The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini
• The Fault in Our Stars — John Green ✨ // wooing helps much, TIA ;)
• The 3 Mistakes of My Life, Five Point Someone, Revolution 2020 — Chetan Bhagat
• Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift
• Pareeksha Guru — Srinivas Das // the first Hindi novel ever written