Fall 2017 Reading List

It is that time of the year when an update is in order for this year's fall reading list. Listed below are my top picks classified in no particular order.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A philosophical treatise disguised a crime novel. Tip: The Bantam Classic edition translated by Andrew R. McAndrew is the most seamless and easy to read.

Quote: "I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."

2. Innovators: The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. This book is a biography of the computer and the internet. Along with being a biography it provides colour around the people who started it all from the geeks to the counter-revolutionaries.

Quote: “One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other ‘My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!’” he japed in 1951.”

3. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Counter-intuitive, the book broaches the taboo aspects not covered by any other business book. If you need to read one book on the practicalities of building and running a business, this is the one.

Quote: “That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.”

4. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Fascinating book by a fascinating author. Beautifully narrated right down the ages. The author considers the subject; namely Cancer; not just a disease, a scientific problem or a social condition, but as a character – an adversary with a story to tell.

Quote: “Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos” 

5. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson. Second book by Walter Isaacson on the list. The most comprehensive amongst the various books on Einstein with access to archives that provides a thought provoking view of the many sided genius.

Quote: “Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it.”

6. Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs by B. David Yoffie. Perspectives on scaling up business deriving insights from moves of three giants.

Quote: “great strategists “look forward” to determine where they want their companies to be at a given point in the future and then “reason back” to identify moves that will take the business there.”

7. Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh. Plunge headlong into a riveting journey of solving Mathematics' most famous and extremely difficult riddle, Fermat's Last Theorem. The riddle, itself is very simple to understand but equally extremely difficult to prove; it took over three centuries (358 years to be precise) to be finally proved by Sir Andrew Wiles in 1993.

Quote: “I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.”

8. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. It basically summarizes the journey of the writer in finding her own happiness and it's kind of good. The book is written very well and it encompasses all the aspects of the given topic which she talks about and you'll for sure be able to relate to the book.

Quote: “What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”

9. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. Kolkata, back during the madness of Naxalite movement. The book moves swiftly through the years to Rhode Island and California, but keeps coming back to the past buried in Kolkata, always as a reference point that alters the course of its characters’ lives in so many different and surprising ways.

Quote: “Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people’s lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful.

10. No Middle Name by Lee Child. No selection is complete without Jack Reacher’s short stories. Beware: The stories are not really short, figuratively speaking, but will keep you engrossed and add a piece of the overall puzzle.

Quote: “Aaron stared down at his pad of paper, unsure. He said, “So what would be the best word for you? Vagrant?” Reacher said, “Itinerant. Distributed. Transient. Episodic.”