Books
- Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem - *****
- Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - *****
- Slouching towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - *****
- The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin - *****
- UFOs by Leslie Kean - *****
- The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal - ****
- The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus - *****
- Capital by Thomas Picketty - *****
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari - ***1/2
- Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace - ****
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton - *****
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair - ***
- Blue Nights by Joan Didion - ****
- A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis - ***1/2
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion - *****
- Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald - ****
- To Change the Church by Ross Douthat - *****
- India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul - ****1/2
- An Area of Darkness by V. S. Naipaul - ****1/2
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - *****
- Ghost Wars by Steve Coll - ****
- The End of the Story by Lydia Davis - ****
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - *****
- Petersburg by Andrei Bely - *****
- Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe by George Friedman - ****
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - *****
- Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky) - ****
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky - *****
- The Roots of Hinduism by Asko Parpola - *****
- Submission by Michel Houellebecq - ***1/2
- We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider - ***1/2
- The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins - *****
- The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt - *****
- India: A History by John Keay - *****
- Age of the Crisis of Man by Mark Greif - ***
- Capital v.1 by Karl Marx - *****
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins - *
- The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis - ***1/2
- Happyslapped by a Jellyfish by Karl Pilkington - ****
- Liberty by Isaiah Berlin - *****
- 13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak - *****
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky - *****
- Things that Matter by Charles Krauthammer - *****
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche - ****
- The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche - ***
- Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche - *****
- The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen - ****
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens - ****
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie - *****
- Two Cultures by C. P. Snow - *****
- History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russel - *****
- My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen - *****
- Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin - *****
- In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric Kandel - *****
- In Search of Lost Time - Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust - *****
- A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss - ***1/2
- Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino - *****
- Great House by Nicole Krauss - ****
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - ****
- Autobiography of Mark Twain - ****
- The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker - ***
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli - *****
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius -****
- Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod - *****
- Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert - *****
- Devil in the white city by Erik Larson - **
- Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (translated by Nabokov) - ****1/2
- Maus by Art Spiegelman - ***
- The Duchamp Book by Gavin Parkinson - ****
- The Code Book by Simon Singh - ****
- Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murakami - **1/2
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - ****
- Ulysses by James Joyce - This book is beyond ratings!
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - *****
- Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - **1/2
- In Search of Lost Time - Swann's Way by Marcel Proust - *****
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - **1/2
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - ****
- Hamlet by Shakespeare - *****
- The story of Art by E. H. Gombrich - *****
- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift - **1/2
- Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence - ****
- A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare - **1/2
- The Overcoat by Nikolay Gogol - *****
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse - ****
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - ***1/2
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - *****
- Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg - ***1/2
- Principles of Quantum Mechanicsby Paul Dirac - ****1/2
- Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams - ***
- Insanity Defense by Woody Allen - *****
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol - ****1/2
- Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara - ****
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy - ***
- Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh - ***
- Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger - ***1/2
- A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh - ****
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding - ****1/2
- The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth - ***1/2
- Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka - ****1/2
- In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka - ****
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - ***
- The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald - ****
- Godel, Escher, Bachby Douglas Hofstadter - ****1/2
- The fabric of reality by David Deutsch - ****
- The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher - ****1/2
- A Passage to India by E.M.Forster - ****
- Candide by Voltaire - ***1/2
- Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry - ****
- Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut - ***1/2
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac - ****
- God of small things by Arundhati Roy - *
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - ***1/2
- Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux - **
- Sorrows of young Werther by Goethe - ****
- Stranger by Albert Camus - ****
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - *****
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - ****1/2
- Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov - ****
- Siddhartha by Herman Hesse - *1/2
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - ****1/2
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - *****
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - *
- Animal Farm by George Orwell - ****
- 1984 by George Orwell - ****
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - ****
- Mind is a Myth conversations with U.G.Krishnamurthy - *****
- Any book by Wodehouse is *****
- Entire Holmes canon is *****
A short description of the rating system:
The meanings of rating from 5 stars to 2 stars is obvious but I'd like to explain the 1 star rating. It's not that they are bad books because I would never really pick up something which was so bad that it deserved a 1 star. But I feel that something is dishonest about them and that they are famous for the wrong reasons. They are also easy works, one that appeals to simple emotions like our pity at extreme suffering (Arundhati Roy) or our adoration of the absolute, all conquering genius (Ayn Rand), or our gullibility against mystical ideas (Siddhartha), or our simple minded outrage fueled by lowest common denominator ideas of the age (God Delusion).
At some point in my life I had the misfortune of reading bestsellers by such peddlers of utter mediocrity as Jeffrey Archer and Robin Cook. They are not included in the above list for obvious reasons. Also not included are books which I consider appropriate only for those less than 15 years of age (Harry Potter, LoTR, Hunger Games, and the awful deluge of recent young-adult books).