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A running list of favorite books.

See more on Goodreads.

Fiction

• The Anthropologists

  Ayşegül Savaş

• Austerlitz

  W.G. Sebald

• Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

  R.F. Kuang

• The Baroque Cycle (trilogy: Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World)

  Neal Stephenson

• Bel Canto

  Ann Patchett

• The City & the City

  China Miéville

• Exhalation

  Ted Chiang

• The God of Small Things

  Arundhati Roy

• The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

  James McBride

• The Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire)

  Amitav Ghosh

• Invisible Cities

  Italo Calvino

• The Luminaries

  Eleanor Catton

• Lincoln in the Bardo

  George Saunders

• Martyr!

  Kaveh Akbar

• Midnight's Children

  Salman Rushdie

• Names of the Women

  Jeet Thayil

• One Hundred Years of Solitude

  Gabriel García Márquez

• Persepolis (The Complete Persepolis)

  Marjane Satrapi

• Quarterlife

  Devika Rege

• The Saint of Bright Doors

  Vajra Chandrasekera

Non-Fiction

• Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

  Gretchen McCulloch

• The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

  Mark Forsyth

• The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science

  Kate Zernike

• A Field Guide to Getting Lost

  Rebecca Solnit

• Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene

  Natalie Angier

• Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka

  Srikar Raghavan

• Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals

  Gail Omvedt

• A Short History of Nearly Everything

  Bill Bryson

• Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

  Peggy Mohan

• What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

  Randall Munroe