These are the books/stories that I have read recently. I tend to forget what I read in the past and this is an effort to keep track of it from now onwards. Since I keep 'the reading habit' and 'books' in such high regard, hopefully this list will also induce enough guilt in me when it has been stationary for a while that I'll pick up another one of those pieces between whose covers lie the infinite imagination of man and the circular wheels of history. And obviously, if someone wants to take a leaf out of these recommendations, I hope that it will be satisfying. Colored are the books which have a very special place in my heart and which I just. cannot. stop. raving. about.
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- 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 (À la recherche du temps perdu:Du côté de chez Swann) by Marcel Proust - ***** (Too bad I can only give it 5 stars!)
- 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 (s)
- Principles of Quantum Mechanicsby Paul Dirac - ****1/2 (s)
- 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 (s)
- The fabric of reality by David Deutsch - **** (s)
- The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher - ****1/2 (l)
- 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 - ****
- 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 - *****
- Animal Farm by George Orwell - ****
- 1984 by George Orwell - ****
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - ****
- Mind is a Myth conversations with U.G.Krishnamurthy - ***** (p)
(s): Scientific book
(p): Primarily philosophical book
(l): Book on linguistics