Rajat's bookshelf: read en-US Wed, 14 May 2025 00:52:08 -0700 60 Rajat's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Mill House Murders (House Murders, #2)]]> 60747213
The brilliant Shimada Kiyoshi arrives on the scene, but as he investigates the seemingly impossible events of that evening, death strikes again, and again...

Can Shimada get to the truth before the killer gets to him? And can you solve the mystery of the Mill House Murders before he does?]]>
253 Yukito Ayatsuji 1782278338 Rajat 0 to-read 3.63 1988 The Mill House Murders (House Murders, #2)
author: Yukito Ayatsuji
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: to-read
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Counterattacks at Thirty 215583234
Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.

Like a pacifist version of V in V for Vendetta, Gyuok recruits a trio of office allies to carry out plans for minor revenge. Together, these four “rebelsâ€� commit tiny protests against those in more powerful positions through spraying graffiti, throwing eggs, and writing anonymous exposés. But as their attacks increase, the initial joy they felt at the release becomes something more and Jihye and the others will discover the beauty of friendship and the extraordinary power of unity against adversity.Ìý]]>
240 Sohn Won-Pyung 0063378108 Rajat 0 to-read 3.59 2017 Counterattacks at Thirty
author: Sohn Won-Pyung
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/13
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood]]> 176443727 Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall, About Last Night, and Glory, creator of the show thirtysomething, and executive producer of My So-Called Life, gives a dishy, behind-the-scenes look at working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

“I’ll be dropping a few names,� Ed Zwick confesses in the introduction to his book. “Over the years I have worked with self-proclaimed masters-of-the-universe, unheralded geniuses, hacks, sociopaths, savants, and saints.�

He has encountered these Hollywood types during four decades of directing, producing, and writing projects that have collectively received eighteen Academy Award nominations (seven wins) and sixty-seven Emmy nominations (twenty-two wins). Though there are many factors behind such success, including luck and the contributions of his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz, he’s known to have a special talent for bringing out the best in the people he’s worked with, especially the actors. In those intense collaborations, he’s sought to discover the small pieces of connective tissue, vulnerability, and fellowship that can help an actor realize their character in full.

Talents whom he spotted early include Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, Claire Danes, and Jared Leto. Established stars he worked closely with include Leonardo DiCaprio, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Daniel Craig, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Jennifer Connelly. He also sued Harvey Weinstein over the production of Shakespeare in Love —and won. He shares personal stories about all these people, and more.

Written mostly with love, sometimes with rue, this memoir is also a meditation on working, sprinkled throughout with tips for anyone who has ever imagined writing, directing, or producing for the screen. Fans with an appreciation for the beautiful mysteries—as well as the unsightly, often comic truths—of crafting film and television won’t want to miss it.
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304 Ed Zwick 1668046997 Rajat 0 to-read 3.97 2024 Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood
author: Ed Zwick
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/13
shelves: to-read
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Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]>
327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Rajat 0 to-read 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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Julie Chan Is Dead 220161576 In this razor-sharp, diabolical debut thriller, a young woman steps into her deceased twin’s influencer life, only to discover dark secrets hidden behind her social media façade.

Julie Chan has nothing. Her twin sister has everything. Except a pulse.

Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier with nothing to lose, finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. Separated at a young age, the identical twins were polar opposites and rarely spoke, except for one viral video that Chloe initiated (Finding My Long-Lost Twin And Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL). When Julie discovers Chloe’s lifeless body under mysterious circumstances, she seizes the chance to live the life she’s always envied.

Transforming into Chloe is easier than expected. Julie effortlessly adopts Chloe’s luxurious influencer life, complete with designer clothes, a meticulous skincare routine, and millions of adoring followers. However, Julie soon realizes that Chloe’s seemingly picture-perfect life was anything but.

Haunted by Chloe’s untimely death and struggling to fit into the privileged influencer circle, Julie faces mounting challenges during a weeklong island retreat with Chloe’s exclusive group of influencer friends. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister’s demise and realizes she might be the next target.]]>
320 Liann Zhang 1668067897 Rajat 0 to-read 3.66 2025 Julie Chan Is Dead
author: Liann Zhang
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
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<![CDATA[It's a Continent: Unravelling Africa's history one country at a time]]> 59162712
IT'S A CONTINENT aims to counter the misconception that Africa is a country by breaking down this vast, beautiful and complex continent into regions and countries. Each of the 54 African countries has a unique history and culture, and this book highlights the key historical moments that have shaped each nation and contributed to its global position, as well as within the African continent.

Each chapter (focusing on a different country) of the book brings to light stories and African figures that have been marginalised in mainstream education, in a humorous and easily-digestible format, breaking down facts and events that you wouldn't believe happened.

Why is the Liberian flag so similar to the Stars and Stripes of the United States? Have you heard about Thomas Sankara's quest for Burkina Faso's self-sufficiency? African soldiers' contribution to World War II?

There are many aspects of history that mainstream education doesn't address, and this book allows the reader to understand the consequences of historical colonial activities within the African Continent, and how many African countries continue to re-build. The majority of countries within the continent are young, not just in population but in age, as many only gained independence in the 20th Century. IT'S A CONTINENT is the bold and brilliant book for readers who want to gain an understanding of things you were never taught in school.]]>
355 Astrid Madimba 1529376785 Rajat 0 3.63 It's a Continent: Unravelling Africa's history one country at a time
author: Astrid Madimba
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.63
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: currently-reading, africa, history
review:

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Homeseeking 211025407 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593712993.

An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

A single choice can define an entire life.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.]]>
512 Karissa Chen Rajat 0 currently-reading, china 4.23 2025 Homeseeking
author: Karissa Chen
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: currently-reading, china
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Marble Hall Murders 217432789 Murder links past and present once again in this mind-boggling metafictional mystery fromÌýAnthony Horowitz—another tribute to the golden age of Agatha Christie featuring detective Atticus Pund and editor Susan Ryland, stars of the New York Times bestsellers Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders.

Editor Susan Ryeland has left her Greek island, her hotel, and her Greek boyfriend Andreas in search of a new life back in England.

Freelancing for Causton Books, she’s working on the manuscript of a novel, Pund’s Last Case, by a young author named Eliot Crace, a continuation of the popular Alan Conway series. ÌýSusan is surprised to learn that Eliot is the grandson of legendary children’s author Marian Crace, who died some fifteen years ago—murdered, Elliot insists, by poison.

As Susan begins to read the manuscript’s opening chapters, the skeptical editor is relieved to find that Pund’s Last Case is actually very good. Set in the South of France, it revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, who, though mortally ill, is poisoned—perhaps by a member of her own family. But who did it? And why?

The deeper Susan reads, the more it becomes clear that the clues leading to the truth of Marian Crace’s death are hidden within this Atticus Pund mystery.

While Eliot’s accusation becomes more plausible, his behavior grows increasingly erratic.. Then he is suddenly killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Susan finds herself under police scrutiny as a suspect in his killing.

Three mysterious deaths. Multiple motives and possible murderers. If Susan doesn’t solve the mystery of Pund’s Last Case, she may well be the next victim.]]>
592 Anthony Horowitz 0063305704 Rajat 0 currently-reading 4.36 2025 Marble Hall Murders
author: Anthony Horowitz
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: currently-reading
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The Moonstone 6138
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the definitive 1871 edition.]]>
528 Wilkie Collins 0375757856 Rajat 4 to-read 3.90 1868 The Moonstone
author: Wilkie Collins
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1868
rating: 4
read at: 2012/11/09
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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Doctor Zhivago 130440
Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.]]>
592 Boris Pasternak 0679774386 Rajat 0 to-read 4.03 1957 Doctor Zhivago
author: Boris Pasternak
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human]]> 8574712 384 V.S. Ramachandran 0393077829 Rajat 0 to-read 4.14 2010 The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
author: V.S. Ramachandran
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions]]> 1713426
Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?

Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?

Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?

And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?

When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?

In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.

Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same "types" of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable--making us "predictably" irrational.

From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. "Predictably Irrational" will change the way we interact with the world--one small decision at a time.]]>
247 Dan Ariely Rajat 0 to-read 4.12 2008 Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
author: Dan Ariely
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[The Sun that Rose from the Earth]]> 23592744 600 Shamsur Rahman Faruqi 0670086916 Rajat 0 4.02 2014 The Sun that Rose from the Earth
author: Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: historical-fiction, poetry, to-read
review:

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The State of The Nation 18000854
An ardent defender of the Constitution of India, Fali Nariman has today attained the status of an outstanding lawyer who strongly believes in the rule of the law and stands by his convictions. In this timely volume, the author highlights crucial issues that the legislature, the executive, judiciary, the bar and the common people have to deal with virtually on a day-to-day basis. His main focus is on corruption at various levels and in ‘hallowed� institutions, including the judiciary.

The author contends that the legislative and executive wings of the government � the elected representatives of the people � were (and are) expected to provide for the welfare of the people. He points out that they have failed miserably simply because making of laws is not enough; applying and enforcing laws � which are also the primary duties of the government � have left much to be desired. Consequently, it is the judiciary that tells the government when and how to distribute excess food, what crops to grow and what not to grow, which economic projects are good for the country and which are not, and what fuel should be used in our vehicles and whether 2G/3G licenses should be allotted only through auctions! The judiciary is hence accused of overreach!

The contents also throw light on other important subjects such as: the implications of reservations for certain sections of the population (including minorities); the true purpose and significance of the Constitution; Centre–state relations; and whether the Constitution has benefited the common people over the years.

This is a book that is absorbing as well as thought-provoking that will make the readers put on their thinking caps.]]>
412 Fali S. Nariman Rajat 0 to-read 4.08 2013 The State of The Nation
author: Fali S. Nariman
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood]]> 8701960 Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.]]>
527 James Gleick 0375423729 Rajat 0 science, to-read 4.02 2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
author: James Gleick
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: science, to-read
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Exile and the Kingdom 76826
The six works featured in this volume are:

"The Adulterous Woman" ("La Femme adultère")
"The Renegade or a Confused Spirit" ("Le Renégat ou un esprit confus")
"The Silent Men" ("Les Muets")
"The Guest" ("L'Hôte")
"Jonas or the Artist at Work" ("Jonas ou l’artiste au travail")
"The Growing Stone" ("La Pierre qui pousse")]]>
213 Albert Camus 067973385X Rajat 0 3.91 1950 Exile and the Kingdom
author: Albert Camus
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: existentialism, france, nobel, short-story, to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China]]> 1848 9780743246989

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.

An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents� experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,� a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.]]>
562 Jung Chang Rajat 0 4.28 1991 Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
author: Jung Chang
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: china, chinese-lit, memoir, to-read
review:

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Modern Romance 23453112
Some of our problems are unique to our time.Ìý“Why did this guy just text me an emoji of a pizza?â€Ìý“Should I go out with this girl even though sheÌýlisted Combos as one of her favorite snack foods?ÌýCombos?!â€� “My girlfriend just got a message fromÌýsome dude named Nathan. Who’s Nathan? Did heÌýjust send her a photo of his penis? Should I checkÌýjust to be sure?â€Ì�

But the transformation of our romantic livesÌýcan’t be explained by technology alone. In a shortÌýperiod of time, the whole culture of finding loveÌýhas changed dramatically. A few decades ago,Ìýpeople would find a decent person who lived inÌýtheir neighborhood. Their families would meetÌýand, after deciding neither party seemed like aÌýmurderer, they would get married and soon haveÌýa kid, all by the time they were twenty-four. Today,Ìýpeople marry later than ever and spend years ofÌýtheir lives on a quest to find the perfect person, aÌýsoul mate.

For years, Aziz Ansari has been aiming hisÌýcomic insight at modern romance, but for ²Ñ´Ç»å±ð°ù²ÔÌý¸é´Ç³¾²¹²Ô³¦±ð, the book, he decided he needed to takeÌýthings to another level. He teamed up with NYUÌýsociologist Eric Klinenberg and designed a massiveÌýresearch project, including hundreds of interviewsÌýand focus groups conducted everywhere fromÌýTokyo to Buenos Aires to Wichita. They analyzedÌýbehavioral data and surveys and created their ownÌýonline research forum on Reddit, which drewÌýthousands of messages. They enlisted the world’sÌýleading social scientists, including Andrew Cherlin, Eli Finkel, HelenÌýFisher, Sheena Iyengar, Barry Schwartz, SherryÌýTurkle, and Robb Willer. The result is unlike anyÌýsocial science or humor book we’ve seen before.

In Modern Romance, Ansari combines hisÌýirreverent humor with cutting-edge social scienceÌýto give us an unforgettable tour of our newÌýromantic world.]]>
279 Aziz Ansari 1594206279 Rajat 0 to-read 3.79 2015 Modern Romance
author: Aziz Ansari
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[The Hindus: An Alternative History]]> 5263037 From one of the world's foremost scholars on Hinduism, a vivid reinterpretation of its history

An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds.

Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated even within a century; its central tenets—karma, dharma, to name just two—arise at particular moments in Indian history and differ in each era, between genders, and caste to caste; and what is shared among Hindus is overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to one group or another. Yet the greatness of Hinduism—its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness—lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that continue to inspire debate today.

Wendy Doniger is one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world. With her inimitable insight and expertise Doniger illuminates those moments within the tradition that resist forces that would standardize or establish a canon. Without reversing or misrepresenting the historical hierarchies, she reveals how Sanskrit and vernacular sources are rich in knowledge of and compassion toward women and lower castes; how they debate tensions surrounding religion, violence, and tolerance; and how animals are the key to important shifts in attitudes toward different social classes.

The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers—many of them far removed from Brahmin authors of Sanskrit texts—have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms from which to consider the ironies, and overlooked epiphanies, of history.]]>
800 Wendy Doniger 1594202052 Rajat 0 nook, to-read 3.64 2009 The Hindus: An Alternative History
author: Wendy Doniger
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: nook, to-read
review:

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Nostromo 115476 ]]> 336 Joseph Conrad 0486424529 Rajat 0 to-read 3.81 1904 Nostromo
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1904
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[The Body: A Guide for Occupants]]> 43582376 A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe.

Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.

A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this book will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.]]>
450 Bill Bryson 0385539304 Rajat 0 pop-biology, science, to-read 4.30 2019 The Body: A Guide for Occupants
author: Bill Bryson
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: pop-biology, science, to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam]]> 40411388 No god but God, internationally acclaimed scholar Reza Aslan explains Islam—the origins and evolution of the faith—in all its beauty and complexity. This updated edition addresses the events of the past decade, analyzing how they have influenced Islam’s position in modern culture. Aslan explores what the popular demonstrations pushing for democracy in the Middle East mean for the future of Islam in the region, how the Internet and social media have affected Islam’s evolution, and how the war on terror has altered the geopolitical balance of power in the Middle East. He also provides an update on the contemporary Muslim women’s movement, a discussion of the controversy over veiling in Europe, an in-depth history of Jihadism, and a look at how Muslims living in North America and Europe are changing the face of Islam. Timely and persuasive, No god but God is an elegantly written account that explains this magnificent yet misunderstood faith.]]> 384 Reza Aslan Rajat 0 4.13 2005 No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam
author: Reza Aslan
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: islam, history, religion, middle-east, to-read
review:

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By the Sea 77818
Meanwhile, Latif Mahmud, someone intimately connected with Saleh's past, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When Saleh and Latif meet in an English seaside town, a story is unravelled. It is a story of love, betrayal, of seduction and of possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times.]]>
245 Abdulrazak Gurnah 0747557853 Rajat 0 african-lit, africa, to-read 3.86 2001 By the Sea
author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: african-lit, africa, to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[An Innocent Abroad: Life-Changing Trips From 35 Great Writers]]> 22246011 320 John Berendt 1743603606 Rajat 0 travel, to-read 3.59 2014 An Innocent Abroad: Life-Changing Trips From 35 Great Writers
author: John Berendt
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: travel, to-read
review:

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<![CDATA[Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style]]> 40063024 A witty, informative guide to writing "good English" from Random House's longtime copy chief and one of Twitter's leading enforcers of proper grammar--a twenty-first-century Elements of Style

As authoritative as it is amusing, this book distills everything Benjamin Dreyer has learned from the hundreds of books he has copyedited, including works by Elizabeth Strout, E. L. Doctorow, and Frank Rich, into a useful guide not just for writers but for everyone who wants to put their best foot forward in writing prose. Dreyer offers lessons on the ins and outs of punctuation and grammar, including how to navigate the words he calls "the confusables," like tricky homophones; the myriad ways to use (and misuse) a comma; and how to recognize--though not necessarily do away with--the passive voice. (Hint: If you can plausibly add "by zombies" to the end of a sentence, it's passive.)

People are sharing their writing more than ever--on blogs, on Twitter--and this book lays out, clearly and comprehensibly, everything writers can do to keep readers focused on the real reason writers write: to communicate their ideas clearly and effectively. Chock-full of advice, insider wisdom, and fun facts on the rules (and non-rules) of English, this book will prove invaluable to everyone who wants to shore up their writing skills, mandatory for people who spend their time editing and shaping other people's prose, and--perhaps best of all--an utter treat for anyone who simply revels in language.]]>
269 Benjamin Dreyer 0812995708 Rajat 0 writing, to-read 4.34 2019 Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
author: Benjamin Dreyer
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited]]> 5848
“Belongs in the same category of travel writing as Lawrence’s books on Italy, Greene’s on West Africa and Pritchett’s on Spain.� � New Statesman

In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart’s appearance with cries of “That is man!� He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of France’s routes nationales. And throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region’s colonial past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics, and values. The result is a work of novelistic vividness and dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his powers.]]>
256 V.S. Naipaul 0375708340 Rajat 0 travel, to-read 3.59 1962 The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited
author: V.S. Naipaul
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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shelves: travel, to-read
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India Uninc. 20885436
The author argues that the real India story, over generations, lies with the many proprietorship and partnership firms, small manufacturing units, kirana stores, single entrepreneurs and household enterprises. That they are being finally given their due, in this important study, is the result of many years of cutting-edge research, which lays bare the lopsided viewpoints of policy-makers and ‘experts�, and urges a broader vision of the country’s economy.

The small entrepreneur says Prof. Vaidyanathan, should prevail over crony capitalism.

Scholarly yet accessible, and offering a wealth of information on an uncharted territory, India Uninc. is a must-read for anybody who aspires to understand the Indian economy —as well as India itself.]]>
259 R. Vaidyanathan Rajat 0 3.91 2014 India Uninc.
author: R. Vaidyanathan
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
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Development with Dignity 15827497 New book Amit Bhaduri Rajat 0 3.80 Development with Dignity
author: Amit Bhaduri
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.80
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<![CDATA[The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China]]> 197877720
For decades China watchers argued that economic liberalization and increasing prosperity would bring democracy to the world’s most populous country. Instead, the Communist Party’s grip on power has only strengthened. Why? The answer, Minxin Pei argues, lies in the effectiveness of the Chinese surveillance state. And the source of that effectiveness is not just advanced technology like facial recognition AI and mobile phone tracking. These are important, but what matters more is China’s vast, labor-intensive infrastructure of domestic spying.

Central government data on Chinese surveillance is confidential, so Pei turned to local reports, police gazettes, leaked documents, and interviews with exiled dissidents to provide a detailed look at the evolution, organization, and tactics of the surveillance state. Following the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the Chinese Communist Party invested immense resources in a coercive apparatus operated by a relatively small number of secret police officers capable of mobilizing millions of citizen informants to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The CCP’s Leninist bureaucratic structure―whereby officials and party activists penetrate every sector of society and the economy, from universities and village committees to delivery companies, telecommunication firms, and Tibetan monasteries―ensures that Beijing’s eyes and ears are truly everywhere.

While today’s system is far more robust than that of years past, it is modeled after mass surveillance implemented under Mao Zedong and Chinese emperors centuries ago. Rigorously empirical and rich in historical insight, The Sentinel State is a singular contribution to our knowledge about coercion in the Chinese state and, more generally, the survival strategies of authoritarian regimes.]]>
336 Minxin Pei 0674257839 Rajat 0 3.98 The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China
author: Minxin Pei
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.98
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shelves: china, espionage, tech, to-read
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<![CDATA[The Class of �77: How My Classmates Changed China]]> 61333061 236 Jaime FlorCruz 9888769413 Rajat 0 china, memoir, to-read 3.88 The Class of ‘77: How My Classmates Changed China
author: Jaime FlorCruz
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
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shelves: china, memoir, to-read
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Dusk (Rosales Saga, #1) 449164


"The foremost Filipino novelist in English, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer."--Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books


"Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story."--Chicago Tribune]]>
325 F. Sionil José 0375751440 Rajat 0 philippines, to-read 4.14 1984 Dusk (Rosales Saga, #1)
author: F. Sionil José
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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shelves: philippines, to-read
review:

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The Maniac 75665931 From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times� Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.]]>
368 Benjamín Labatut 0593654471 Rajat 0 to-read 4.33 2023 The Maniac
author: Benjamín Labatut
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[India And Faraway Lands: 5,000 Years Of Connected History]]> 75302049 356 Ashutosh Mehndiratta Rajat 0 history, india, to-read 4.25 India And Faraway Lands: 5,000 Years Of Connected History
author: Ashutosh Mehndiratta
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.25
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<![CDATA[America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger]]> 58065789 A timely, provocative expose of American political and business leadership's deep ties to China: a network of people who believe they are doing the right thing--at a profound and often hidden cost to U.S. interests.

The past few years have seen relations between China and the United States shift, from enthusiastic economic partners, to wary frenemies, to open rivals. Americans have been slow to wake up to the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party. Why did this happen? And what can we do about it?

In America Second, Isaac Stone Fish traces the evolution of the Party's influence in America. He shows how America's leaders initially welcomed China's entry into the U.S. economy, believing that trade and engagement would lead to a more democratic China. And he explains how--although this belief has proved misguided--many of our businesspeople and politicians have become too dependent on China to challenge it.

America Second exposes a deep network of Beijing's influence in America, built quietly over the years through prominent figures like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Disney chairman Bob Iger, and members of the Bush family. And it shows how to fight that influence-without being paranoid, xenophobic, or racist. This is an authoritative and important story of corruption and good intentions gone wrong, with serious implications not only for the future of the United States, but for the world at large.



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288 Isaac Stone Fish 0525657703 Rajat 0 china, america, to-read 3.93 America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger
author: Isaac Stone Fish
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.93
book published:
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No Onions Nor Garlic 2046181 326 Srividya Natarajan 0143099612 Rajat 0 humour, caste, to-read 3.41 2006 No Onions Nor Garlic
author: Srividya Natarajan
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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shelves: humour, caste, to-read
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<![CDATA[Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back]]> 39979237 From ruined towns on the edge of Siberia, to Bond-villain lairs in Knightsbridge and Manhattan, something has gone wrong with the workings of the world.

Once upon a time, if an official stole money, there wasn't much he could do with it. He could buy himself a new car or build himself a nice house or give it to his friends and family, but that was about it. If he kept stealing, the money would just pile up in his house until he had no rooms left to put it in, or it was eaten by mice.

And then some bankers in London had a bright idea.

Join the investigative journalist Oliver Bullough on a journey into Moneyland - the secret country of the lawless, stateless superrich.

Learn how the institutions of Europe and the United States have become money-laundering operations, undermining the foundations of Western stability. Discover the true cost of being open for business no matter how corrupt and dangerous the customer. Meet the kleptocrats. Meet their awful children. And find out how heroic activists around the world are fighting back.

This is the story of wealth and power in the 21st century. It isn't too late to change it.

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305 Oliver Bullough 1782833331 Rajat 0 4.21 2018 Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back
author: Oliver Bullough
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: business-finance-and-economics, crime, to-read
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<![CDATA[Business and Politics in India (Modern South Asia)]]> 42358333 336 Christophe Jaffrelot 0190912472 Rajat 0 3.75 Business and Politics in India (Modern South Asia)
author: Christophe Jaffrelot
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language]]> 1187815 Peoplewatching is the culmination of a career of watching people - their behaviour and habits, their personalities and their quirks. Desmond Morris shows us how people, consciously and unconsciously, signal their attitudes, desires and innermost feelings with their bodies and actions, often more powerfully than with their words.]]> 400 Desmond Morris 0099429780 Rajat 0 to-read 4.00 1977 Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language
author: Desmond Morris
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read
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<![CDATA[Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World]]> 45306313
“A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand what has already happened here in America and what lies ahead if Trump is reelected in Novemberâ€�. A magisterial account of the money and violence behind the world’s most powerful dictatorships.â€Ìý–Washington Post

In this shocking, meticulously reported work of narrative nonfiction, an award-winning investigative journalist exposes “capitalism’s monsterâ€â€”global kleptocracy—and reveals how it is corrupting the world around us.

They are everywhere, the thieves and their people. Masters of secrecy. Until now we have detected their presence only by what they leave behind. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh Desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London.

They have amassed more money than most countries. But what they are really stealing is power.

In this real-life thriller packed with jaw-dropping revelations, award-winning investigative journalist Tom Burgis weaves together four stories that reveal a terrifying global web of the troublemaker from Basingstoke who stumbles on the secrets of a Swiss bank, the ex-Soviet billionaire constructing a private empire, the righteous Canadian lawyer with a mysterious client, and the Brooklyn crook protected by the CIA.

Glimpses of this shadowy world have emerged over the years. In Kleptopia, Burgis connects the dots. He follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators, and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the White House, the trail shows something even more the thieves are uniting. And the human cost will be great.]]>
464 Tom Burgis 0062883674 Rajat 0 3.77 2020 Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
author: Tom Burgis
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention]]> 51708831 From a brilliant young historian, a colorful journey through 7,000 years and twenty-six world cities that shows how urban living has been the spur and incubator to humankind's greatest innovations.

In the two hundred millennia of our existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. Historian Ben Wilson, author of bestselling and award-winning books on British history, now tells the grand, glorious story of how city living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning with Uruk, the world's first city, dating to 5000 BC and memorably portrayed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he shows us that cities were never a necessity but that once they existed their density created such a blossoming of human endeavor--producing new professions, forms of art, worship, and trade--that they kick-started nothing less than civilization.

Guiding readers through famous cities over 7,000 years, he reveals the innovations driven by each: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Epoque Paris. In the modern age, he studies the impact of verticality in New York City, the sprawl of L.A., and the eco-reimagining of twenty-first-century Shanghai.

Lively, erudite, page turning, and irresistible, Metropolis is a grand tour of human achievement.]]>
464 Ben Wilson 0385543468 Rajat 0 4.15 2020 Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention
author: Ben Wilson
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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shelves: history, urban-studies, to-read
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<![CDATA[A Short History of Nearly Everything]]> 21 544 Bill Bryson 076790818X Rajat 0 science, to-read 4.21 2003 A Short History of Nearly Everything
author: Bill Bryson
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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shelves: science, to-read
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A Room of One’s Own 18521 A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.]]> 112 Virginia Woolf Rajat 0 to-read 4.22 1929 A Room of One’s Own
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1929
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1)]]> 66857 ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý
Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar , and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, ready to start over in a world in which he had always felt a stranger. One of very few Cambridge University graduates to have been imprisoned prior to his freshman year, Fry is a brilliantly idiosyncratic character who continues to attract controversy, empathy and real devotion.]]>
366 Stephen Fry 1569472025 Rajat 0 to-read 3.96 1997 Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1)
author: Stephen Fry
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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We Need to Talk About Kevin 80660 The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry.

Eva never really wanted to be a mother - and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

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400 Lionel Shriver 006112429X Rajat 0 to-read 4.07 2003 We Need to Talk About Kevin
author: Lionel Shriver
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read
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The Songlines 76844 The Songlines asks and tries to answer these questions: Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals? Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it? Why have the great teachers—Christ or the Buddha—recommended the Road as the way. to salvation? Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?

We do not often ask these questions today for we commonly assume that living in a house is normal and that the wandering life is aberrant. But for more than twenty years Chatwin has mulled over the possibility that the reverse might be the case.

Pre-colonial Australia was the last landmass on earth peopled not by herdsmen, farmers, or city dwellers, but by hunter-gatherers. Their labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent are known to us as Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, but to the Aboriginals as the tracks of their ancestors—the Way of the Law. Along these "roads" they travel in order to perform all those activities that are distinctively human—song, dance, marriage, exchange of ideas, and arrangements of territorial boundaries by agreement rather than force.

In Chatwin's search for the Songlines, Arkady is an ideal friend and guide: Australian by birth, the son of a Cossack exile, with all the strength and warmth of his inheritance. Whether hunting kangaroo from a Land Cruiser, talking to the diminutive Rolf in his book-crammed trailer, buying drinks for a bigoted policeman (and would-be writer), cheering as Arkady's true love declares herself (part of The Songlines is a romantic comedy), Chatwin turns this almost implausible picaresque adventure into something approaching the scale of a Greek tragedy.

The life of the Aboriginals stands in vivid contrast, of course, to the prevailing cultures of our time. And The Songlines presents unforgettable details about the kinds of disputes we know all too well from less traumatic confrontations: over sacred lands invaded by railroads, mines, and construction sites, over the laws and rights of a poor people versus a wealthy invasive one. To Chatwin these are but recent, local examples of an eternal basic distinction between settlers and wanderers. His book, devoted to the latter, is a brilliant evocation of this profound optimism: that man is by nature not a bellicose aggressor but a pacific, song-creating, adaptive species whose destiny is to quest for the truth.]]>
304 Bruce Chatwin 0140094296 Rajat 0 3.99 1987 The Songlines
author: Bruce Chatwin
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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shelves: australia, travel, mythology, to-read
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<![CDATA[Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life]]> 43087 448 Eric J. Hobsbawm 1565849655 Rajat 0 to-read 4.02 2002 Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life
author: Eric J. Hobsbawm
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read
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Life on Earth 1027910 319 David Attenborough 0316057452 Rajat 0 to-read 4.45 1979 Life on Earth
author: David Attenborough
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century]]> 529579 The Next 100 Years draws on a fascinating exploration of history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years. Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era—with changes in store,

� The U.S.-Jihadist war will conclude—replaced by a second full-blown cold war with Russia.
� China will undergo a major extended internal crisis, and Mexico will emerge as an important world power.
� A new global war will unfold toward the middle of the century between the United States and an unexpected coalition from Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Far East; but armies will be much smaller and wars will be less deadly.
� Technology will focus on space—both for major military uses and for a dramatic new energy resource that will have radical environmental implications.
� The United States will experience a Golden Age in the second half of the century.

Written with the keen insight and thoughtful analysis that has made George Friedman a renowned expert in geopolitics and forecasting, The Next 100 Years presents a fascinating picture of what lies ahead. For continual, updated analysis and supplemental material, go to ]]>
272 George Friedman 038551705X Rajat 0 geopolitics, to-read 3.64 2008 The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
author: George Friedman
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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shelves: geopolitics, to-read
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The Tibetan Book of the Dead 208123 The Tibetan Book of the Dead is "immaculately rendered in an English both graceful and precise." Translated with the close support of leading contemporary masters and hailed as “a tremendous accomplishment,� this book faithfully presents the insights and intentions of the original work. It includes one of the most detailed and compelling descriptions of the after-death state in world literature, practices that can transform our experience of daily life, guidance on helping those who are dying, and an inspirational perspective on coping with bereavement.]]> 535 Padmasambhava 0143104942 Rajat 0 4.17 1350 The Tibetan Book of the Dead
author: Padmasambhava
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1350
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: metaphysics, mystical, religion, tibet, buddhism, to-read
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Bharathipura 10383394 First published in 1973, 'Bharathipura' reveals U.R. Ananthamurthy's (b.1932) lifelong preoccupation with moving beyond caste and class interests in a modern society.
Set in contemporary India, 'Bharathipura' revolves around the life of an 'enlightened' modern Indian, Jagannatha, who in order to get rid of his personal burdens commits a 'scandalous' act. His attempt to take 'untouchables' into the local Manjunatha temple exposes the complexities of the caste system and the myth of social justice in modern India. Further, the novel brings to light how the contemporary world recreates and reconstructs the past to protect hierarchical structures prevalent across societies, and also portrays the altering destinies of individuals and communities.
In Susheela Punitha's hands, the translation retains the cultural and linguistic ambience of the Kannada society. The detailed Introduction by N. Manu Chakravarthy sets the work in the context of twentieth-century India. The in-depth interview of the author by Chakravarthy, a special feature of this volume, opens a window to Ananthamurthy's art and worldview.

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312 U.R. Ananthamurthy 0198070489 Rajat 0 to-read 3.58 1973 Bharathipura
author: U.R. Ananthamurthy
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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Five Star Billionaire 16071831 An entertaining, expansive, and eye-opening novel that captures the vibrance of China today, by a writer whose previous work has been called “mesmerizing,� “haunting,� “breathtaking,� “mercilessly gripping,� “seductive,� and “luminous.�

Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job - but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn't exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family's real-estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harboured a crush on Yinghui, who has reinvented herself from a poetry-loving, left-wing activist to a successful Shanghai businesswoman. She is about to make a deal with the shadowy figure of Walter Chao, the five-star billionaire of the novel, who - with his secrets and his schemes - has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel's characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants. Five Star Billionaire, the dazzling kaleidoscopic new novel by the award-winning writer Tash Aw, offers rare insight into China today, with its constant transformations and its promise of possibility.]]>
400 Tash Aw 0812994345 Rajat 3 china, shanghai 3.46 2013 Five Star Billionaire
author: Tash Aw
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2025/05/12
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: china, shanghai
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<![CDATA[The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism]]> 10238 366 Fritjof Capra 1570625190 Rajat 0 science, to-read 3.97 1975 The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism
author: Fritjof Capra
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: science, to-read
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<![CDATA[Ask the Dust (The Saga of Arturo Bandini, #3)]]> 46227 "Fante was my god." —Charles Bukowski, in his introduction to Ask the Dust

Arturo Bandini, a young, struggling Italian-American writer living in a seedy hotel in 1930s Los Angeles, falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. The pair embark on a strange and strained love-hate relationship, which slowly, but inexorably, descends into the realm of madness.

Ask the Dust is one of the truly great, yet unsung, American novels of the twentieth century. A tough and unsentimental story with a soft and tender heart, it remains as fresh and affecting as the day it was written.]]>
165 John Fante 0060822554 Rajat 0 to-read 4.17 1939 Ask the Dust (The Saga of Arturo Bandini, #3)
author: John Fante
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)]]> 38447
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.]]>
311 Margaret Atwood 038549081X Rajat 0 to-read 4.15 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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Brothers 3920295
Here is China as we’ve never seen it, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble Chinese history that has already scandalized millions of readers in the author’s homeland. Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live , gives us a surreal tale of two brothers riding the dizzying roller coaster of life in a newly capitalist world. As comically mismatched teenagers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne’er-do-well, and Song Gang, his bookish, sensitive stepbrother, vow that they will always be brothers--a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China. Their tribulations play out across a richly populated backdrop that is every bit as the rapidly-changing village of Liu Town, full of such lively characters as the self-important Poet Zhao, the craven dentist Yanker Yu, the virginal town beauty (turned madam) Lin Hong, and the simpering vendor Popsicle Wang.

With sly and biting humor, combined with an insightful and compassionate eye for the lives of ordinary people, Yu Hua shows how the madness of the Cultural Revolution has transformed into the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a monumental spectacle and a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time.]]>
656 Yu Hua 0375424997 Rajat 0 to-read 4.05 2005 Brothers
author: Yu Hua
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Devil's Advocate (Eddie Flynn, #6)]]> 56075874 A deadly prosecutor

They call him the King of Death Row. Randal Korn has sent more men to their deaths than any district attorney in the history of the United States.

A twisted ritualistic killing

When a young woman, Skylar Edwards, is found murdered in Buckstown, Alabama, a corrupt sheriff arrests the last person to see her alive, Andy Dubois. It doesn't seem to matter to anyone that Andy is innocent.

A small town boiling with rage


Everyone in Buckstown believes Andy is guilty. He has no hope of a fair trial. And the local defense attorney assigned to represent him has disappeared.

A former con-artist


Hot shot New York lawyer Eddie Flynn travels south to fight fire with fire. He plans to destroy the prosecutors case, find the real killer and save Andy from the electric chair.

But the murders are just beginning.

Is Eddie Flynn next?
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403 Steve Cavanagh Rajat 0 to-read 4.39 2021 The Devil's Advocate (Eddie Flynn, #6)
author: Steve Cavanagh
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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Ask for Andrea 219407654 Meghan, Brecia, and Skye have just one thing in common.

They were all murdered by the same man.

He hunted them online, masquerading as an eligible bachelor. Then he played the perfect gentleman, a thick layer of charm and a thousand-watt smile hiding the fact that his first dates end in shallow graves.

He’s gotten away with murder three times now.

The only thing that might keep him from killing again? The women he murdered.

Meghan, Brecia, and Skye might be dead, but they’re not gone. They’ve found each other. And they won’t rest until they find a way to stop him.

The haunt is on.]]>
295 Noelle W. Ihli Rajat 0 to-read 4.08 2022 Ask for Andrea
author: Noelle W. Ihli
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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Men in the Sun 3429641 96 Ghassan Kanafani 0435994115 Rajat 0 to-read 4.31 1963 Men in the Sun
author: Ghassan Kanafani
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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The Librarian Spy 58787295 A moving novel inspired by the true history of America’s library spies of World War II.

Ava thought her job as a librarian at the Library of Congress would mean a quiet, routine existence. But an unexpected offer from the US military has brought her to Lisbon with a new mission: posing as a librarian while working undercover as a spy gathering intelligence.

Meanwhile, in occupied France, Elaine has begun an apprenticeship at a printing press run by members of the Resistance. It’s a job usually reserved for men, but in the war, those rules have been forgotten. Yet she knows that the Nazis are searching for the press and its printer in order to silence them.

As the battle in Europe rages, Ava and Elaine find themselves connecting through coded messages and discovering hope in the face of war.]]>
400 Madeline Martin 1335426914 Rajat 0 to-read 3.91 2022 The Librarian Spy
author: Madeline Martin
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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Great Big Beautiful Life 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years--or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]>
432 Emily Henry Rajat 0 to-read 4.10 2025 Great Big Beautiful Life
author: Emily Henry
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them]]> 19204115 Into The Woods is a revelation of the fundamental structure and meaning of all stories, from the man responsible for more hours of drama on British television than anyone else, John Yorke.



We all love stories. Many of us love to tell them, and even dream of making a living from it too. But what is a story? Hundreds of books about screenwriting and storytelling have been written, but none of them ask 'Why?' Why do we tell stories? And why do all stories function in an eerily similar way?



John Yorke has been telling stories almost his entire adult life, and the more he has done it, the more he has asked himself why? Every great thinker or writer has their theories: Aristotle, David Hare, Lajos Egri, Robert McKee, Gustav Freytag, David Mamet, Christopher Booker, Charlie Kaufman, William Goldman and Aaron Sorkin - all have offered insightful and illuminating answers. Here, John Yorke draws on these figures and more as he takes us on a historical, philosophical, scientific and psychological journey to the heart of all storytelling.



What he reveals is that there truly is a unifying shape to narrative - one that echoes the great fairytale journey into the woods, and one, like any great art, that comes from deep within. Much more than a 'how to write' book, Into the Woods is an exploration of this fundamental structure underneath all narrative forms, from film and television to theatre and novel-writing. With astonishing detail and wisdom, John Yorke explains to us a phenomenon that, whether it is as a simple fable, or a big-budget 3D blockbuster, most of us experience almost every day of our lives.



'Another book on screenwriting! Oh, how I wanted to hate it! I didn't. I loved it. Much of it was fresh to me. And always interesting, always intelligent and, for a writer, always rewarding', Jimmy McGovern



'In an industry full of so called script gurus and snake oil salesmen, at last there's a book about story that treats writers like grown ups. This isn't about providing us with an ABC of story or telling us how to write a script by numbers. It's an intelligent evaluation into the very nature of storytelling and is the best book on the subject I've read. Quite brilliant', Tony Jordan



John Yorke is Managing Director of Company Pictures, the UK drama independent producing Skins, Shameless, The White Queen and Wolf Hall. For many years he's been responsible for a vast array of British drama; as both Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he's worked on big popular works such as Hustle, Spooks, Casualty and Holby City alongside award-winners such as Bodies, Omagh, Sex Traffic, Not Only But Always and The Curse of Steptoe. His career began single-handedly story-lining EastEnders in its very first BAFTA winning year - beginning a 14 year association that produced some of the biggest audiences in British television history. As a commissioning Editor/Executive Producer, he championed some of the defining works of British television including Life On Mars, The Street, Shameless and Waterloo Road. In 2005 he created the BBC Writers Academy, a year-long in-depth training scheme which has produced a generation of successful television writers.

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309 John Yorke 1846146445 Rajat 0 to-read, writing 4.31 2013 Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them
author: John Yorke
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2013
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<![CDATA[Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir]]> 127282542
In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the stories of her grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.

Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school―and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.

Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns to face the history that shaped her.

Gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls' homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, it exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.]]>
400 Tessa Hulls 0374601658 Rajat 0 to-read 4.45 2024 Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir
author: Tessa Hulls
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Great Transition: The Personalization of Finance is Here]]> 62686536 279 Emmanuel Daniel 9811265321 Rajat 0 to-read 4.40 The Great Transition: The Personalization of Finance is Here
author: Emmanuel Daniel
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
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The Easter Parade 48335 The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.]]> 226 Richard Yates 0413773450 Rajat 0 to-read 4.05 1976 The Easter Parade
author: Richard Yates
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1976
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century]]> 1265397 400 Edward Lucie-Smith 0810939347 Rajat 0 to-read, art 4.00 1996 Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century
author: Edward Lucie-Smith
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/10
shelves: to-read, art
review:

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<![CDATA[The Sea Hawk : Life and Battles of Kanhoji Angrey]]> 62564973 340 Manohar Malgonkar 9356290822 Rajat 0 to-read 4.32 1965 The Sea Hawk : Life and Battles of Kanhoji Angrey
author: Manohar Malgonkar
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East]]> 52142 1111 Robert Fisk 1400075173 Rajat 0 to-read 4.41 2005 The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
author: Robert Fisk
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/10
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<![CDATA[Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America]]> 17860697 Devil in the GroveÌýis the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in an explosive and deadly case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.

In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.�

And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,� into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the “Florida Terror� at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight—not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.â€]]>
464 Gilbert King Rajat 0 to-read 4.47 2012 Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
author: Gilbert King
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
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In Our Mad and Furious City 35212538 Provocative, raw, poetic yet tender, In Our Mad and Furious City marks the arrival of a major new talent in fiction.]]> 292 Guy Gunaratne 1472250192 Rajat 0 to-read 3.84 2018 In Our Mad and Furious City
author: Guy Gunaratne
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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Scrublands 40381911
A year later, accompanied by his own demons from war-time reporting, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His assignment is deliberately simple: describe how the townspeople are coping as the anniversary of their tragedy approaches. But as Martin meets the locals and hears their version of events, he begins to realise that the accepted wisdom � that the priest was a paedophile whose imminent exposure was the catalyst for the shooting, established through an award-winning investigation by his own newspaper � may be wrong.

Just as Martin believes he’s making headway, a dramatic new development rocks the town. The bodies of two German backpackers - missing since the time of the church shootings - are discovered in a dam in the scrublands. It's the biggest story in Australia, the media arrive en masse. Instead of gently easing back into reporting, Martin finds himself thrown into a media storm, and with it a complex mystery.

What was the real reason behind the priest’s shooting spree? And how does it connect to the backpacker murders, if at all? Martin struggles to uncover the town’s dark secrets, putting his job, his mental state, and his life all at risk as events escalate around him.]]>
368 Chris Hammer 150119674X Rajat 0 to-read 3.82 2018 Scrublands
author: Chris Hammer
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
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The Living Mountain 60891994
For one of the binding laws of the Valley, respected by all our warring villages, was that we were never, on any account, to set foot on the slopes of the Great Mountain.]]>
35 Amitav Ghosh 9354898874 Rajat 0 to-read 3.88 The Living Mountain
author: Amitav Ghosh
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.88
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<![CDATA[The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science]]> 6885204
When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still.]]>
608 Richard Holmes 1400031877 Rajat 0 to-read 4.09 2008 The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
author: Richard Holmes
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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The 48 Laws of Power 1303 Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control � from the author of The Laws of Human Nature.

In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling� and “fascinating,� Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum.

Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master�), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness�), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally�). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.]]>
452 Robert Greene 0140280197 Rajat 0 to-read 4.11 1998 The 48 Laws of Power
author: Robert Greene
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Paradigms Lost: Tackling the Unanswered Mysteries of Modern Science]]> 187639 565 John L. Casti 0380711656 Rajat 0 to-read, science 3.89 1989 Paradigms Lost: Tackling the Unanswered Mysteries of Modern Science
author: John L. Casti
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/10
shelves: to-read, science
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<![CDATA[If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity]]> 58078524 “A dazzling, delightful read on what animal cognition can teach us about our own mental shortcomings.�
- Adam Grant

This funny,Ìý"extraordinary and thought-provoking" (The Wall Street Journal)Ìýbook asks whether we are in fact the superior species. As it turns out, the truth is stranger—and far more interesting—than we have been led to believe.

If Nietzsche Were a NarwhalÌýoverturns everything we thought we knew about human intelligence, and asks the question: would humans be better off as narwhals? Or some other, less brainy species? There’s a good argument to be made that humans might be a less successful animal species precisely because of our amazing, complex intelligence.
Ìý
All our unique gifts like language, math, and science do not make us happier or more “successfulâ€� (evolutionarily speaking) than other species. Our intelligence allowed us to split the atom, but we’ve harnessed that knowledge to make machines of war. We are uniquely susceptible to bullshit (though, cuttlefish may be the best liars in the animal kingdom); our bizarre obsession with lawns has contributed to the growing threat of climate change; we are sexually diverse like many species yet stand apart as homophobic; and discriminate among our own as if its natural, which it certainly is not.ÌýIs our intelligence more of a curse than a gift?Ìý ÌýÌý

As scientist Justin Gregg persuasively argues, there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process.Ìý

In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Gregg highlights one feature seemingly unique to humans—our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness—and compares it to our animal brethren. Along the way, remarkable tales of animal smarts emerge, as you’ll discover:Ìý


The house cat who’s better at picking winning stocks than actual fund managersÌý
Elephants who love to drink
Pigeons who are better than radiologists at spotting cancerous tissue
Bumblebees who are geniuses at teaching each other soccer

What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself.]]>
320 Justin Gregg 0316388068 Rajat 0 to-read, pop-biology 3.85 2022 If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity
author: Justin Gregg
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, pop-biology
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<![CDATA[Treasure Islands: Dirty Money, Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole Your Cash by Nicholas Shaxson (2012-02-06)]]> 159138897 0 Nicholas Shaxson Rajat 0 4.38 Treasure Islands: Dirty Money, Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole Your Cash by Nicholas Shaxson (2012-02-06)
author: Nicholas Shaxson
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: to-read, business-finance-and-economics, geopolitics
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<![CDATA[Seeking Allah's Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India]]> 222529517 248 P C Saidalavi 1512828491 Rajat 0 0.0 Seeking Allah's Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India
author: P C Saidalavi
name: Rajat
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: to-read, caste, islam, subaltern
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<![CDATA[The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family]]> 62246 The Sacred Willow illuminates recent Vietnamese history by weaving together the stories of the lives of four generations of her family. Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential landowner, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching while blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She makes clear the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping in jungle camps with her infant son, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon-including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter. Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable family saga but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times.
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506 Duong Van Mai Elliott 0195137876 Rajat 0 to-read 3.94 1999 The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family
author: Duong Van Mai Elliott
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
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ä¹³ã¨å� 3266851 138 Mieko Kawakami 4163270108 Rajat 0 to-read, japan 3.47 2008 ä¹³ã¨åµ
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read, japan
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<![CDATA[Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Being Ruled in Mao's China (Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China)]]> 122169791 354 Hanchao Lu 1009180983 Rajat 0 to-read, china 4.33 Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Being Ruled in Mao's China (Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China)
author: Hanchao Lu
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read, china
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<![CDATA[The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping]]> 209047303 718 Joseph Torigian 1503634752 Rajat 0 to-read 5.00 The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
author: Joseph Torigian
name: Rajat
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
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Ex Supra 62016954 In 2035, an AI-driven disinformation campaign turned us on ourselves. We became the enemy's first strike weapons, and as we set fire to our own country, the People's Liberation Army seized half of the Pacific. From the first combat jump on Mars to the climate change-ravaged jungles of Southeast Asia, EX SUPRA blends the bleeding edge of technology and the bloody reality of combat. In EX SUPRA, the super soldiers are only as strong as their own wills, reality is malleable, and hope only arrives with hellfire. Follow John Petrov, a refugee turned CIA paramilitary officer, Captain Jennifer Shaw, a Green Beret consumed by bloodlust, and many more, as they face off against Chinese warbots, Russian assassins, and their own demons in the war for the future of humanity.]]> 531 Tony Stark Rajat 0 to-read 3.96 Ex Supra
author: Tony Stark
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.96
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<![CDATA[Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life]]> 22609341
Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill� for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.

The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others� experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.

Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm.

Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.

And Emily Nagoski can prove it.]]>
400 Emily Nagoski 1476762090 Rajat 0 to-read, sex 4.28 2015 Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life
author: Emily Nagoski
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future]]> 214709016 The bestsellingÌýauthor of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to uncover the secrets locked in the ice and profoundly shift our understanding of life, the cosmos, and our future on the planet.

For three decades, renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He’s survived polar storms and faced the limits of human endurance to explore questions of how life survived and adapted, and what our future on a changing planet may hold.

Scientific discoveries at Earth’s polar regions have changed the way we see the world and these insights are becoming ever more urgent. These landscapes are the epicenter for rapid change to our planet, with ice retreating, animal species moving toward the equator or going extinct, Indigenous communities confronting dramatic environmental changes, and political battles heating up for newly accessible mineral and gas resources. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—events there in the coming years will affect all life and every nation on the planet.ÌýThe book blends travel, science, and environmental writing to deepen our understanding of animal and plant life, the history of our ice ages, the age of dinosaurs, the history of Western exploration, and the clues meteorites preserved at the poles contain about the cosmos.Ìý

Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Shubin shares lively adventure stories from the field to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand polar regions and to reveal the poles� impact on the rest of life on the planet.]]>
288 Neil Shubin 0593186524 Rajat 0 to-read 4.23 2025 Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future
author: Neil Shubin
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
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<![CDATA[New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country]]> 222377550 260 Selim Koru 0755656431 Rajat 0 to-read, turkey 4.67 New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country
author: Selim Koru
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.67
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Love Is a Dog from Hell 23534 A classic in the Bukowski poetry canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.

Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a “passionate madman.� Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.]]>
312 Charles Bukowski 0876853629 Rajat 0 to-read, poetry 4.01 1977 Love Is a Dog from Hell
author: Charles Bukowski
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, poetry
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उपसंहा� 22067482 136 Kashinath Singh 8126726059 Rajat 0 to-read, hindi-lit 4.13 2014 उपसंहार
author: Kashinath Singh
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[You Have Arrived at Your Destination]]> 49665863 New York Times bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow.

When Sam’s wife first tells him about Vitek, a twenty-first-century fertility lab, he sees it as the natural next step in trying to help their future child get a “leg up� in a competitive world. But the more Sam considers the lives that his child could lead, the more he begins to question his own relationships and the choices he has made in his life.

Amor Towles’s You Have Arrived at Your Destination is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.]]>
54 Amor Towles 1542004349 Rajat 0 to-read 3.51 2019 You Have Arrived at Your Destination
author: Amor Towles
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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Summer Frost 49676965 New York Times bestselling author of Recursion.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision—veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?

Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.]]>
85 Blake Crouch 1542043638 Rajat 0 to-read 4.10 2019 Summer Frost
author: Blake Crouch
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2019
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Poet's Choice 206636 450 Edward Hirsch 0156032678 Rajat 0 to-read 4.15 2006 Poet's Choice
author: Edward Hirsch
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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Every Man Dies Alone 3344411 543 Hans Fallada 1933633638 Rajat 0 to-read 4.22 1947 Every Man Dies Alone
author: Hans Fallada
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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Fireflies in the Mist 8297030 The New Yorker, Qurratulain Hyder is one of the "must reads" of Indian literature. Fireflies in the Mist is Hyder's capstone to her astonishing River of Fire, which was hailed by The New York Review of Books as "magisterial with a technical resourcefulness rarely seen before in Urdu fiction."

Fireflies follows the creation of modern day Bangladesh -- from Indian province, to Partition, to the emergence of statehood -- as told through the impassioned voice of Deepali Sarkar and others around her who live through the turbulence. Hyder perceptively and majestically follows the trajectory of Sarkar's life -- from her secluded upbringing in Dhaka to becoming a socialist rebel and to her ultimate transformation as a diasporic Bengali cosmopolitan -- in the way that many of yesterday's revolutionaries are slowly but surely ensnared within a net of class and luxury dangled in front of them.]]>
325 Qurratulain Hyder 0811218651 Rajat 0 3.91 1979 Fireflies in the Mist
author: Qurratulain Hyder
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt]]> 859018
It was not until 1798, when an unlikely band of scientific explorers traveled from Paris to the Nile Valley, that Westerners received their first real glimpse of what lay beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

Under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Army, a small and little-known corps of Paris's brightest intellectual lights left the safety of their laboratories, studios, and classrooms to embark on a thirty-day crossing into the unknown—some never to see French shores again. Over 150 astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, physicists, doctors, chemists, engineers, botanists, artists—even a poet and a musicologist—accompanied Napoleon's troops into Egypt. Carrying pencils instead of swords, specimen jars instead of field guns, these highly accomplished men participated in the first large-scale interaction between Europeans and Muslims of the modern era. And many lived to tell the tale.

Hazarding hunger, hardship, uncertainty, and disease, Napoleon's scientists risked their lives in pursuit of discovery. They approached the land not as colonizers, but as experts in their fields of scholarship, meticulously categorizing and collecting their finds—from the ruins of the colossal pyramids to the smallest insects to the legendary Rosetta Stone.

Those who survived the three-year expedition compiled an exhaustive encyclopedia of Egypt, twenty-three volumes in length, which secured their place in history as the world's earliest-known archaeologists. Unraveling the mysteries that had befuddled Europeans for centuries, Napoleon's scientists were the first to document the astonishing accomplishments of a lost civilization—before the dark shadow of empire-building took Africa and the Middle East by storm.

Internationally acclaimed journalist Nina Burleigh brings readers back to a little-known landmark adventure at the dawn of the modern era—one that ultimately revealed the deepest secrets of ancient Egypt to a very curious continent.]]>
286 Nina Burleigh 0060597674 Rajat 0 to-read 3.71 2007 Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt
author: Nina Burleigh
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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Last of the Breed 266485 371 Louis L'Amour Rajat 0 to-read 4.22 1986 Last of the Breed
author: Louis L'Amour
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Who Gets What � and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design]]> 22749723
If you’ve ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you’ve participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of “goods,� like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google? This is the territory of matching markets, where “sellers� and “buyers� must choose each other, and price isn’t the only factor determining who gets what.

Alvin E. Roth is one of the world’s leading experts on matching markets. He has even designed several of them, including the exchange that places medical students in residencies and the system that increases the number of kidney transplants by better matching donors to patients. In Who Gets What â€� And Why, Roth reveals theÌýmatching markets hidden around us and shows how to recognize a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions.]]>
260 Alvin E. Roth 0544291131 Rajat 0 3.84 2015 Who Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design
author: Alvin E. Roth
name: Rajat
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, business-finance-and-economics
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<![CDATA[Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka]]> 223317403 About the Book
CULTURAL ENQUIRY AND LITERARY EXPLORATION, A HISTORY OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MOVEMENTS—THIS IS A COMPLEX, NUANCED AND OPEN-MINDED INVESTIGATION INTO MODERN KARNATAKA.
Karnataka is one of India’s most diverse states, as rich in literary and cultural traditions as it is in democratic struggles and political churns. The twentieth century witnessed the birth of a modern Kannada renaissance, accompanied by the emergence of a powerful social conscience. One young man’s desire to explore this vibrant historical backyard, born out of a feeling of being linguistically unmoored, compounded by worries over an increasingly opaque political direction, leads to an ambitious—no, audacious—attempt to unpack the region’s social and cultural histories.
Rama Bhima Soma is an enterprise of translation and rediscovery, packed with stories and conversations. The life and times of legends like Kuvempu and Shivaram Karanth; the fall of Socialism and the rise of the Hindu Right; the intellectual ruminations of U.R. Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi; the wildly popular television serials of T.N. Seetharam and the community-centred one-woman theatre shows of Du Saraswathi; a brief history of Naxalism in Karnataka and glimpses of other complicated legacies of the 1970s� Left—the book explores a dizzyingly wide sweep of Karnataka’s contemporary history, seeking, above all, to forge new connections and begin fresh conversations.
Marshalling a diverse range of literary and scholarly resources, framed through biographical sketches and immersive reportage, Srikar Raghavan’s genre-bending work of narrative non-fiction reanimates some pivotal moments in the making of modern Karnataka. The result is a sizzling dish of ideas rescued from the deep freeze of historical amnesia. ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌�

About the Author
Born in Bangalore and brought up in Mysore, Srikar wrote this book while living in a small village named Parkala in South Canara. Something of that inward trajectory has permeated these pages, he believes. An inveterate bookworm, Srikar fancies himself more of a reader than a writer. He also loves to trek, travel and fiddle around on a guitar.]]>
677 Srikar Raghavan Rajat 0 to-read 4.33 Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka
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India's First Radicals 228191224 India Gazette wrote a report about a group he called the ‘Radicals�, ‘Ultra-Reformers� or ‘the Ultras�, who were responsible for an unprecedented upheaval in social, religious and political thinking centred in Calcutta. Later named ‘Young Bengal�, these students of Henry Derozio at the Hindu College had embarked upon a collision course with orthodoxy and authority, generating scandal and sensation in equal measure.

Focusing on their activities twelve years later in 1843, this book examines their achievements in a radical reassessment of their contribution. That year saw Young Bengal argue for the rights of the peasant, campaign against corruption in the police and judiciary, bring a legal case against a British magistrate for the mistreatment of labourers, and continue their fight against racial, gender and caste discrimination in society. It also marked their formation of the first Indian political party.

India’s First Radicals seeks to rethink the activities of Young Bengal, whose pioneering contributions to public discourse and the changes they wrought were among the earliest shifts to define modern India as we now know it.]]>
486 Rosinka Chaudhuri 9367908490 Rajat 0 to-read 4.71 India's First Radicals
author: Rosinka Chaudhuri
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.71
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<![CDATA[True Story of a Writer, a Philosopher and a Shape-shifter: A Novel]]> 223657815 Is it possible to possess a portable, lightweight (say 400 grams), user-friendly soul with a twenty-four-hour battery life?

WELCOME TO LORD SPIDER’S WORLD OF MARVELOUS LIES
Lord Spider, celebrated author of popular fiction; J.L. Pillai, eminent executioner and voyeur; Rosi, Spider’s wife and freelance philosopher. When they get together to write an essay on ‘Compassion� for the revolutionary party, the art of lying reaches its outrageous zenith. So does story-telling.
Spider’s world is a novel in brilliant, irresistible free fall.]]>
Paul Zacharia 9367907249 Rajat 0 to-read 4.67 True Story of a Writer, a Philosopher and a Shape-shifter: A Novel
author: Paul Zacharia
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.67
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<![CDATA[Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times]]> 135984312
In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang’s lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and heavily influenced the public’s posthumous memory of him. Drawing on archives (in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, France, and Germany), memoires, historical journals, newspapers, interviews, and other scholarly works, this book offers the first biography of Wang that addresses his political, literary, and personal life in a critical light and with sympathetic impartiality.
Ìý]]>
350 Zhiyi Yang 0472076507 Rajat 0 to-read, china 4.20 Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times
author: Zhiyi Yang
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.20
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The Lorax 7784 "Unless someone like you... cares a whole awful lot... nothing is going to get better... It's not."

Long before saving the earth became a global concern, Dr. Seuss, speaking through his character the Lorax, warned against mindless progress and the danger it posed to the earth's natural beauty.

His classic cautionary tale is now available in an irresistible mini-edition, perfect for backpack or briefcase, for Arbor Day, Earth Day, and every day.]]>
72 Dr. Seuss 0679889108 Rajat 0 to-read 4.35 1971 The Lorax
author: Dr. Seuss
name: Rajat
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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