With the help of Goodreads’ Book Reading Challenge, I was able to finish reading 100+ books this 2016. I am listing down those books so worthy of the title ‘influential’, as they have changed me in a multitude of ways.

The Classics

1984 — George Orwell: (For conditioning oneself to the happening dystopia)

Fight Club — Chuck Phalanuik: (The most stylish prose I have ever seen, reread three times for the phraseworthy material)

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories — Franz Kafka: (For the most famous opening line in the history of time: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect)

Jonathan Livingston Seagull — Richard Bach: (How a simple seagull story could have a therapeutic effect on your dreams)

Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse: (When you come across a river, listen. Every space is left for us to contemplate and every letter to absorb. Lust and greed, knowledge and spirituality. The ultimate expressive journey of self-discovery)

Fiction

A Song of Ice and Fire — George R R Martin: (For the fantasy, the rich reddit community and all the spoilers and alternative theories that still continue to evolve)

The Martian — Andy Weir: (How does a person maintain sanity and good humor while being the only person alive on Mars?)

The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand: (Had to read this as I was 21, the ripest age for Fountainhead, enough said)

Millenium Trilogy — Stieg Larsson: (To understand misogyny and violence towards women in a Swedish setting, fantastic crime thriller. Lisbeth Salander — The woman who hated men who hated women)

Ishmael: An adventure of the mind and spirit — Daniel Quinn: (Some books make you think, think and think. Just like the dog who eats grass to understand horses. You read this book to know more about the mind and spirit, and get confidently confused by a talking gorilla)

Non-Fiction

Falling of the map: Some Lonely Places of the World — Pico Iyer: (How even a simple act of waiting for the flight to come at the airport could be described in such a beautiful way. Makes me guilty as to how much we fail to observe while travelling)

Four Hour Workweek, Four Hour Body and Tools of the Titans — Timothy Ferris: (Anything by Tim Ferris, famous for his podcast with the highest number of viewership online, for the time-management, body hack and life hack tips)

Thinking Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman: (Makes us aware of our own heuristics and biases. We are not as perfect as we thought we are. So many flaws of our funny little brain)

The Journey Home — Radhanath Swami: (To know more about India, the spiritual knots that tie us, about the journey to seek oneself, and ultimately Lord Krishna)

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for the Fantastic Future — Ashlee Vance: (A tribute to the most workaholic person in this planet)

The Death of the Liberal Class — Chris Hedges: (O’ how he pokes the corpse of contemporary liberal class. Should be reading this in these Trumpian times)

Many Lives, Many Masters — Brian Weiss: (Reincarnation, anyone?)

The Aquariums of Pyongyang —Kang Chol-Hwang: (Horrifying true-story of how a person escapes from North Korea and the tragedy of human rights in this hell-hole)

Phantoms in the Brain — V.S Ramachandran: (A neurobiologist experiencing religious revelations and spirituality by examining human brain through its complexes such as Alien Hand syndrome, Frigoli complex etc.)

Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead — Sheryl Sandberg: (Tips from Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg for the future supermoms and for men who are misled by the ‘feminist’ tag.)

Modern Romance — Aziz Ansari: (Navigating the complex topography of modern day romance through the lens of a standup comedian)

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business — Charles Duhigg: (How habit loops could be enhanced or altered via small tricks. The Cue. The Routine. The Reward)

What Everybody is Saying: An Ex-FBI’s guide to Speed Reading people — Joe Navarro: (The only body language manual you will need to read)

David and Goliath, Outliers and Tipping Point — Malcolm Gladwell: (Because, Malcolm Gladwell)

Language Intelligence — Joseph J. Romm: (How rhetoric catches the attention of people. How the choice of figure of speeches could wield power)

Tofu Cookery — Louise Hagler: (How to make anything with tofu. I love tofu!)

Kafka on the Shore — Haruki Murakami: (It just flows like a river, you dont realise when it started and how it ended. Only murakami could do this)

Stiff, Bonk — Mary Roach: (The science of the dead and the science of sex, nice accounts)

Guts — Chuck Phalanuik: (78 people fainted while reading this. The most gut-wrenching, horrifying short story…Only 16 pages, Chuck. How do you do that?)

Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb: (The best contemporary philosopher, and the richest book I have read in 2016)

Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb: (About highly improbable occurable events which shake the modern world)

Fooled by Randomness — Nassim Nicholas Taleb: (On how randomness could change your life. To embrace randomness)

A short history of nearly everything — Bill Bryson: (Bill Bryson should re-write all the history textbooks on behalf of the constitution of the world)

Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right — Atul Gawande: (How checklists are effective in executing complex tasks. Most recommended by Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell)

One Straw Revolution — Masanobu Fukoka: (No plowing, no fertilizers, no weeding, no insect control. Still gets maximum yield. Fukuoka Sensei’s ideals interwoven with Taoist and Buddhist philosophies make you ponder — Why didn’t you come across this before?)

The Complete Essays — Montaigne: (If I have to choose desert island books, I would choose this accompanied with Bhagavad Gita. Pre-death and post-death.)

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets — Michael J. Sanders: (Fascinated by the ethics of the Trolley problem which he so eloquently portrays in those Harvard lectures, I take it one step further by reading the morality of markets. Good choice for people getting introduced to the conjunctions of economics and ethics, its limits and arguments)

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain