Pramit's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 20 Sep 2026 08:07:48 -0700 60 Pramit's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai]]> 1339079 360 Jerry Pinto 0143029665 Pramit 0 to-read 3.94 2003 Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai
author: Jerry Pinto
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/09/20
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]]> <![CDATA[What Are You Doing With Your Life?]]> 22145861 Who are you?
What do you want from life?

Life hurts us all, but rarely are we taught how to deal with these shocks. Jiddu Krishnamurti offers an introduction to many of life’s themes from relationships and love, to fear and loneliness. He asks questions such as ‘What is the significance of life?’ and ‘What is the purpose of life?’ He argues that we ask these questions when there is chaos and uncertainty within. And ultimately it is our responsibility to the choices we make and how we choose to live our lives.]]> J. Krishnamurti Pramit 0 to-read 3.90 1899 What Are You Doing With Your Life?
author: J. Krishnamurti
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1899
rating: 0
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]]> A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 736 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Pramit 0 to-read 4.24 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/09/08
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]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk” city of “old traditions and new machinery,” but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Pramit 5 4.48 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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date added: 2026/09/05
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]]> The Snow Leopard 764165 338 Peter Matthiessen 0140255087 Pramit 5 4.06 1978 The Snow Leopard
author: Peter Matthiessen
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1978
rating: 5
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]]> The Forty Rules of Love 6642715 Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mir­rors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.

In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her 2007 novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together incarnate the poet's timeless message of love.]]> 354 Elif Shafak Pramit 0 to-read 4.14 2009 The Forty Rules of Love
author: Elif Shafak
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/21
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]]> The God of Small Things 9777
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes—Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.]]> 321 Arundhati Roy 0679457313 Pramit 0 to-read 3.97 1997 The God of Small Things
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> Did You Ever Love Me? 255481739 I bartered my heart for them.]]> 132 Rithvik Singh 9377301920 Pramit 0 to-read 3.93 Did You Ever Love Me?
author: Rithvik Singh
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/21
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]]> The Stationery Shop of Tehran 53722147 1953, Tehran. In a small shop in a country on the brink of unrest, two people meet for the very first time.

Roya loves nothing better than to while away the hours in the stationery shop run by Mr Fakhri. The store, stocked with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles, and thick wads of writing paper, also carries translations of literature from all over the world. Bahman, with his burning passion for justice, is like no one else she has ever met.

But all around them, as their relationship blossoms, life in Tehran is changing.

Suddenly, shockingly, violence erupts: a coup d'etat that forever changes their country's future, as well as their own.

Marjan Kamali's beautiful novel explores themes of love and loss, and delivers and unforgettable ending.]]> 320 Marjan Kamali 1471192652 Pramit 0 to-read 4.07 2019 The Stationery Shop of Tehran
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> The Anthropologists 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.” Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 183 Aysegül Savas 163973306X Pramit 0 to-read 3.83 2024 The Anthropologists
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/09
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]]> 1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3) 10357575 The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s — 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.]]> 944 Haruki Murakami 0307593312 Pramit 0 to-read 3.94 2009 1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3)
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/08/06
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]]> A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 14891 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident.

The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years.

By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.]]> 496 Betty Smith 0061120073 Pramit 0 to-read 4.29 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
author: Betty Smith
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]]> 60551
In The Book, Alan Watts provides us with a much-needed answer to the problem of personal identity, distilling and adapting the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta.

A revelatory primer on what it means to be human, from "the perfect guide for a course correction in life" (Deepak Chopra)—and a mind-opening manual of initiation into the central mystery of existence.]]> 163 Alan W. Watts 0679723005 Pramit 0 to-read 4.21 1966 The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
author: Alan W. Watts
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/06/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to Be Calm in a Busy World]]> 30780006
“Wise advice on how to reflect and slow down.” — Elle

Is it the world that’s busy, or is it my mind?

The world moves fast, but that doesn’t mean we have to. This bestselling mindfulness guide by Haemin Sunim (which means “spontaneous wisdom”), a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher born in Korea and educated in the United States, illuminates a path to inner peace and balance amid the overwhelming demands of everyday life.

By offering guideposts to well-being and happiness in eight areas—including relationships, love, and spirituality—Haemin Sunim emphasizes the importance of forging a deeper connection with others and being compassionate and forgiving toward ourselves. The more than twenty full-color illustrations that accompany his teachings serve as calming visual interludes, encouraging us to notice that when you slow down, the world slows down with you.]]> 288 Haemin Sunim 0143130773 Pramit 0 to-read 4.04 2012 The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to Be Calm in a Busy World
author: Haemin Sunim
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/05/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books]]> 7603 Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

]]> 356 Azar Nafisi 081297106X Pramit 0 to-read 3.65 2003 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
author: Azar Nafisi
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/05/17
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]]> Curry Summer 249443964 220 Pranav Prattap Singh 9361852353 Pramit 0 to-read 4.20 Curry Summer
author: Pranav Prattap Singh
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World]]> 28256439 The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware. Much like human families, tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, and support them as they grow, sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling and creating an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group. As a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough time of it and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group.

Drawing on groundbreaking new discoveries, Wohlleben presents the science behind the secret and previously unknown life of trees and their communication abilities; he describes how these discoveries have informed his own practices in the forest around him. As he says, a happy forest is a healthy forest, and he believes that eco-friendly practices not only are economically sustainable but also benefit the health of our planet and the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.]]> 272 Peter Wohlleben 1771642483 Pramit 0 to-read 4.06 2015 The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World
author: Peter Wohlleben
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/04/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind)]]> 241523776 Career advice that actually works from a straight-shooter recruiter

Did you know the average job search takes more than five months? That’s because today’s job market is more challenging—and more confusing—than ever. How are we supposed to get hired, get paid, and get ahead in our careers? Why is everything so complicated and gatekept? 

That’s where Emily the Recruiter comes in. Using her years of experience as a recruiter and career coach, she pulls back the curtain on everything employment-related and tells you all you need to know about job hunting, networking, and not letting your boss drive you crazy. A much-needed antidote to the “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” ethos, this guidebook gives you the real talk you need to lock in when you clock in.

You’ll learn how

Optimize your résumé and LinkedIn profileNetwork like a proStrike a healthy work-life balanceCrush job interviews and salary negotiationsDefeat impostor syndrome and communicate with confidenceSucceed in your career without making it your whole identity
If you’re ready to work smarter, not harder, Clock In is the no-filter, no-fluff resource you need to thrive in your nine-to-five—and beyond.]]> 256 Emily Durham Pramit 0 to-read 4.18 Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind)
author: Emily Durham
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.18
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date added: 2026/04/05
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]]> Himalaya: A Human History 49098218
Spanning millennia, from its earliest inhabitants to the present conflicts over Tibet and Everest, Himalaya is a soaring account of resilience and conquest, discovery and plunder, oppression and enlightenment at the ‘roof of the world’.

From all around the globe, the unique and astonishing geography of the Himalaya has attracted those in search of spiritual and literal elevation: pilgrims, adventurers and mountaineers seeking to test themselves among the world’s most spectacular and challenging peaks. But far from being wild and barren, the Himalaya has throughout the ages been home to an astonishing diversity of indigenous and local cultures, as well as a crossroads for trade, and a meeting point and conflict zone for the world’s superpowers. Here Jesuit missionaries exchanged technologies with Tibetan Lamas, Mongol Khans employed Nepali craftsmen, Armenian merchants exchanged musk and gold with Mughals. Here too the East India Company grappled for dominance with China’s emperors, independent India has been locked in conflict with Mao’s Communists and their successors, and the ideological confrontation of the Cold War is now being buried beneath mass tourism and ecological transformation.
Featuring scholars and tyrants, bandits and CIA agents, go-betweens and revolutionaries, Himalaya is a panoramic, character-driven history on the grandest but also the most human scale, by far the most comprehensive yet written, encompassing geology and genetics, botany and art, and bursting with stories of courage and resourcefulness.]]> 592 Ed Douglas 1847924131 Pramit 4 3.64 Himalaya: A Human History
author: Ed Douglas
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.64
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2026/03/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1; Rincewind, #1)]]> 34497 228 Terry Pratchett 0060855924 Pramit 0 to-read 4.04 1983 The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1; Rincewind, #1)
author: Terry Pratchett
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/30
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]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 27793819 The bestselling Turkish classic of love and longing in a changing world, available in English for the first time.



'It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.'

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul.



'Passionate but clear . . . Ali's success [is in ] his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rise and fall.' Atilla Özkirimli, writer and literary historian]]> 168 Sabahattin Ali 014198127X Pramit 0 to-read 4.15 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Belonging to the World: A Journey from Grief to Connection in Every Country on Earth]]> 243583269 When Barry Hoffner lost his wife and travel partner, Jackie, in a sudden tragedy, his grief was a black hole that consumed everything. But amid the quiet wreckage of loss, something unexpected stirred: the call to move, to reconnect, and to live fully again.
What began as a reluctant return to the road became an audacious mission to visit all 193 countries on Earth—not to escape his pain, but to transform it. Along the way, Barry discovered a world with far more depth and complexity than headlines suggest—one full of unexpected joy, even amid hardship and struggle. From war zones to mountaintops, refugee camps to ancient ruins, he found people whose kindness and openness brought him back to life.
Belonging to the World is a deeply felt memoir of healing from grief, finding resilience, and forging human connection across the globe.]]> 343 Barry Hoffner 1964721415 Pramit 0 to-read 4.68 Belonging to the World: A Journey from Grief to Connection in Every Country on Earth
author: Barry Hoffner
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.68
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/22
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]]> <![CDATA[We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People]]> 195660519
Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. She played barefoot in the forest and didn’t walk on pavement, or see a car, until she was a teenager and left to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. But after Nemonte’s ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture, she listened.

Nemonte returned to the forest and traditional ways of life and became one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She spearheaded an alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest.

We Will Be Jaguars is an astonishing memoir by an equally astonishing woman. Nemonte digs into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, and hacking away at racist notions of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, she reveals a life story as rich, harsh, and vital as the Amazon rainforest herself.]]> 368 Nemonte Nenquimo 1419763776 Pramit 0 to-read 4.48 2024 We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People
author: Nemonte Nenquimo
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/20
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]]> <![CDATA[The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape]]> 125313 The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots.

In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."

The Geography of Nowhere has become a touchstone work in the two decades since its initial publication, its incisive commentary giving language to the feeling of millions of Americans that our nation's suburban environments were ceasing to be credible human habitats. Since that time, the work has inspired city planners, architects, legislators, designers and citizens everywhere. In this special 20th Anniversary edition, dozens of authors and experts in various fields share their perspective on James Howard Kunstler's brave and seminal work.]]> 304 James Howard Kunstler 0671888250 Pramit 0 to-read 4.04 1993 The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
author: James Howard Kunstler
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/16
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]]> The Possessed 18822 768 Fyodor Dostoevsky 1593082509 Pramit 0 to-read 4.18 1871 The Possessed
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1871
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself]]> 217223354 A gripping memoir of faith, family, identity, and stardom, in Devout pop star David Archuleta shares his story of leaving the Mormon church, navigating the relationship with his emotionally abusive father, coming to terms with his sexuality, and finding strength in being your authentic self.

Three years ago American Idol alum and pop star David Archuleta found himself on the floor of his apartment, suicidal, riddled with anxiety, and pleading to a god he was no longer sure even existed. It was a crisis of faith and identity, but it was also a turning point for a man who grew up queer in the Mormon church with severe anxiety and constantly under the pressure of his overbearing manager of a father. After that night, David vowed to be his authentic self.

Of course, the journey to authenticity is never easy, which is the story Archuleta shares in Devout. From his childhood growing up in the Mormon church, to allegations of sexual abuse against his father and step-grandfather, to his time on American Idol and how the show runners and producers mistreated their young contestants, Archuleta’s memoir is filled with earnest, revelatory anecdotes from his fascinating personal and public lives.

Not just for Archuleta’s myriad fans, Devout is a universal story of hope, told with sincerity and humility. It’s a salve for anyone who’s felt different, questioned their faith, felt they were living inauthentically. Most importantly, it’s a story for anyone whose had to break yourself down in order to rebuild yourself stronger than ever, and that’s everyone.]]> 288 David Archuleta 0063417804 Pramit 0 to-read 4.27 2026 Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself
author: David Archuleta
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/03/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning]]> 52845775
As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.

Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.]]> 209 Cathy Park Hong 1984820362 Pramit 0 to-read 4.18 2020 Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
author: Cathy Park Hong
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/24
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]]> <![CDATA[All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today]]> 158649729 The fascinating history of women’s health as it’s never been told before.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women’s healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by women’s own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences. The result is a cultural and societal legacy that continues to shape the (mis)treatment and care of women.

While the modern age has seen significant advancements in the medical field, the notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on—as do the pervasive societal stigmas and lingering ignorance that shape women’s health and relationships with their own bodies.

Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Dr. Elizabeth Comen peels back the curtain on the collective medical history of women to reintroduce us to our whole bodies—how they work, the actual doctors and patients whose perspectives and experiences laid the foundation for today’s medical thought, and the many oversights that still remain unaddressed. With a physician’s knowledge and empathy, Dr. Comen follows the road map of the eleven organ systems to share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own experience treating thousands of women.

Empowering women to better understand ourselves and advocate for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives—for us and generations to come—All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of women’s medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of women’s history and bodies.]]> 368 Elizabeth Comen 0063293013 Pramit 0 to-read 4.30 2024 All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today
author: Elizabeth Comen
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
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date added: 2026/02/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Around the World in Eighty Days]]> 54479
Inspired by Jules Verne’s own sea travels and his fascination with circumnavigating the globe, the avid dreamer’s picaresque voyage inspired generations of adventurers who were eager to best Verne’s challenge—from nineteenth-century journalist Nellie Bly to Monty Python’s Michael Palin.]]> 252 Jules Verne 014044906X Pramit 0 to-read 3.95 1872 Around the World in Eighty Days
author: Jules Verne
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times]]> 56268863
Looking at the headlines--a global pandemic, the worsening climate crisis, political upheaval--it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.

In this urgent book, Jane Goodall, the world's most famous living naturalist and Doug Abrams, internationally-bestselling author, explore--through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue--one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.

Told through stories from a remarkable career and fascinating research, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? Filled with engaging dialogue and pictures from Jane’s storied career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in today’s world.

And for the first time, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope: from living through World War II, to her years in Gombe, to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice. She details the forces that shaped her hopeful worldview, her thoughts on her past, and her revelations about her next--and perhaps final--adventure.

There is still hope, and this book will help guide us to it.]]> 252 Jane Goodall 1250784093 Pramit 0 to-read 4.22 2021 The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
author: Jane Goodall
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/02/01
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]]> The Beekeeper of Aleppo 43124137 The unforgettable love story of a mother blinded by loss and her husband who insists on their survival as they undertake the Syrian refugee trail to Europe.

Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo--until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. On the way, Nuri is sustained by the knowledge that waiting for them is Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has started an apiary and is teaching fellow refugees in Yorkshire to keep bees.

As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss, but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls. Above all, they must journey to find each other again.

Moving, powerful, compassionate, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. It is the kind of book that reminds us of the power of storytelling.]]> 317 Christy Lefteri 1984821210 Pramit 0 to-read 4.14 2019 The Beekeeper of Aleppo
author: Christy Lefteri
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans]]> 231404078 "With powerful stories and practical science, Maya examines how we find purpose after adversity and possibility under uncertainty.” —Adam Grant

"A rare combination of beautiful storytelling, cognitive science, and wholehearted wisdom. —Brené Brown

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A revelatory exploration of how we can find meaning in the tumult of change, from a renowned cognitive scientist and host of the critically acclaimed podcast A Slight Change of Plans

Life has a way of thwarting our best-laid plans. Out of nowhere, we’re confronting the end of a relationship, an unexpected diagnosis, the loss of a job, or some other twist of fate. In these moments, it can feel like we’re free-falling into the unknown.

As a cognitive scientist, Maya Shankar has spent decades studying the human mind. When an unwanted change in her own life left her reeling, she sought out people who had navigated major disruptions. In The Other Side of Change, Shankar tells their riveting, singular stories and weaves in scientific insights to illuminate universal lessons hidden within them. The result is a rich portrait of our complex reactions to change and a deep well of wisdom we can draw from during these experiences.

Shankar invites us to rethink our relationship with change altogether. When a big change happens to us, it can lead to profound change within us. The unique stresses and demands of being thrust into a new reality can lead us to uncover new abilities, perspectives, and values, transforming us in extraordinary ways. What if we saw moments of upheaval as an opportunity to reimagine who we can be, rather than as something to just endure? What potential could we unlock within ourselves?

Whether you're processing a past change, grappling with a present one, or bracing for a future one, this book is a wise and thought-provoking companion to help you discover who you can become on the other side of change.]]> 247 Maya Shankar 0593713702 Pramit 0 to-read 4.14 2026 The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans
author: Maya Shankar
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2026
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (Vintage Departures)]]> 10662 Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan now travels from West Africa to Southeast Asia to report on a world of disintegrating nation-states, warring nationalities, metastasizing populations, and dwindling resources. He emerges with a gritty tour de force of travel writing and political journalism. Whether he is walking through a shantytown in the Ivory Coast or a death camp in Cambodia, talking with refugees, border guards, or Iranian revolutionaries, Kaplan travels under the most arduous conditions and purveys the most startling truths. Intimate and intrepid, erudite and visceral, The Ends of the Earth is an unflinching look at the places and peoples that will make tomorrow's headlines--and the history of the next millennium.
]]> 496 Robert D. Kaplan 0679751238 Pramit 0 to-read 4.10 1996 The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (Vintage Departures)
author: Robert D. Kaplan
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2026/01/09
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]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919–2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Pramit 0 to-read 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture]]> 38363729 To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West.

At the heart of this history is a process of translation, in which Western figures took on Soviet roles: Pablo Picasso as a political rabble-rouser; Rockwell Kent as a quintessential American painter; Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway as teachers of love and courage under fire; J. D. Salinger and Giuseppe De Santis as saviors from Soviet clichés. Imported novels challenged fundamental tenets of Soviet ethics, while modernist paintings tested deep-seated notions of culture. Western films were eroticized even before viewers took their seats. The drama of cultural exchange and translation encompassed discovery as well as loss.

Eleonory Gilburd explores the pleasure, longing, humiliation, and anger that Soviet citizens felt as they found themselves in the midst of this cross-cultural encounter. The main protagonists of To See Paris and Die are small-town teachers daydreaming of faraway places, college students vicariously discovering a wider world, and factory engineers striving for self-improvement. They invested Western imports with political and personal significance, transforming foreign texts into intimate belongings.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet West disappeared from the cultural map. Gilburd’s history reveals how domesticated Western imports defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, as well as its death and afterlife.]]> 480 Eleonory Gilburd 0674980719 Pramit 0 to-read 4.24 2018 To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture
author: Eleonory Gilburd
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II]]> 273197 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction, finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.

Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's foremost historian of the Second World War in the Pacific," gives us the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted, from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes and fears of men and women in every walk of life. Already regarded as the benchmark in its field, Embracing Defeat is a work of colossal scholarship and history of the very first order.]]> 676 John W. Dower 0393320278 Pramit 0 to-read 4.14 1999 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
author: John W. Dower
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/26
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]]> Another Country 60501778 Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the late 1950s.]]> 435 James Baldwin Pramit 0 to-read 4.29 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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]]> The Bell Jar 56616095 (back cover)]]> 288 Sylvia Plath 0060837020 Pramit 0 to-read 3.99 1963 The Bell Jar
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/12/23
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia]]> 15815364 The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the boldly imagined tale of a poor boy's quest for wealth and love.

His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world's pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation, and exceeds it. the astonishing and riveting tale of a man's journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over "rising Asia." It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hopes it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.]]> 230 Mohsin Hamid 1594487294 Pramit 4 3.80 2013 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2013
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed]]> 215089406 A beautifully rendered debut memoir of family, legacy, conservation, the natural world—and those who inhabit it.

As a civil engineer, Sangamithra Iyer knows about resilience from studying soils and water. As an animal rights activist, she advocates for a revolution in how we value and relate to other species. And as the child of immigrants from India, she searches for submerged histories.

Animated by a series of questions—How do we disentangle ourselves from systems of harm? Is it possible to grasp the scale of planetary sorrow and emerge with truth and love as our guides, rather than despair? What is the relationship between individual action and systemic change?—this memoir takes the form of three meandering rivers, each written as a letter. Addressing the first of them to her grandfather, Iyer assembles the story of a man who embraced Gandhi’s philosophy and went to work developing wells in Tamil Nadu. In a second letter, addressed to her father, she explores their shared interest in cultivating compassion for all beings. And then in a final letter, addressed to readers, she braids these explorations of her familial past with her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world, always seeking ways to move beyond resignation and restore flow.

A lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated, Governing Bodies is a timeless work with profoundly timely relevance.]]> 416 Sangamithra Iyer 1571313931 Pramit 0 to-read 4.35 Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed
author: Sangamithra Iyer
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.35
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date added: 2025/12/18
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]]> A Guardian and a Thief 232207672 Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times bestseller A Burning —longlisted for the National Book Award—is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other. A piercing and propulsive tour de force.

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.

Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.

A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 224 Megha Majumdar 0593804872 Pramit 0 to-read 3.73 2025 A Guardian and a Thief
author: Megha Majumdar
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/11/25
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]]> <![CDATA[A Long Walk to Freedom: 1918-1962: Early Years, 1918-1962 v. 1]]> 17159733


'Burns with the luminosity of faith in the invincible nature of human hope and dignity . . . Unforgettable' ANDRE BRINK



'Enthralling . . . Mandela emulates the few great political leaders such as Lincoln and Gandhi, who go beyond mere consensus and move out ahead of their followers to break new ground' Donald Woods in the SUNDAY TIMES]]> 512 Nelson Mandela Pramit 0 to-read 4.48 1994 A Long Walk to Freedom: 1918-1962: Early Years, 1918-1962 v. 1
author: Nelson Mandela
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/11/03
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]]> Giovanni’s Room 406235 178 James Baldwin Pramit 0 to-read 4.38 1956 Giovanni’s Room
author: James Baldwin
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/10/19
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]]> Paradise Lost 15997 Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny. The struggle rages across three worlds - heaven, hell, and earth - as Satan and his band of rebel angels plot their revenge against God. At the center of the conflict are Adam and Eve, who are motivated by all too human temptations but whose ultimate downfall is unyielding love.

Marked by Milton's characteristic erudition, Paradise Lost is a work epic both in scale and, notoriously, in ambition. For nearly 350 years, it has held generation upon generation of audiences in rapt attention, and its profound influence can be seen in almost every corner of Western culture.]]> 453 John Milton 0140424393 Pramit 0 to-read 3.85 1667 Paradise Lost
author: John Milton
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1667
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/10/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Cat Who Taught Zen: A Beautifully Illustrated Exploration of Self-Discovery]]> 123239380 Big Panda and Tiny Dragon comes a beautifully illustrated exploration into the journeys we take for self-discovery and the connections we make along the way. In a distant city, an old cat considers himself as wise as can be, until he hears of an ancient pine far away, under the boughs of which infinite wisdom can be found. Thus, the Cat embarks on a journey deep into the forest to search for the tree. Along the way, he meets new friends—the Hare, the Magpie, the Wolf Cub, the Monkey, the Tortoise, and the Tiger—and comes across the energetic young Kitten. What wisdom does the Cat have to impart to his friends, and, perhaps more importantly, what does he still have to learn? Inspired by Zen koans, with stunning illustrations and a gentle voice, The Cat Who Taught Zen has wisdom to offer all readers.]]> 176 James Norbury 006334761X Pramit 0 to-read 4.29 2023 The Cat Who Taught Zen: A Beautifully Illustrated Exploration of Self-Discovery
author: James Norbury
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/09/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb]]> 220160123 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER


THE 'MASTERPIECE' COMPLETE ORAL HISTORY OF THE ATOMIC BOMB - BY A PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

'Magisterial...A stunning account that brings to the fore the nuclear saga's surreal combination of ingenuity, fate, and terror.' -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

'If you are an intelligent person, or at the very least think you are, you have to read The Devil Reached Toward the Sky...This period in history has never been more relevant and frightening than it is today.' -James Patterson

'Comprehensive and engrossing...Excellent oral history.' -Kirkus Reviews

From the New York Times bestselling author of When the Sea Came Alive and The Only Plane in the Sky, a sweeping and comprehensive oral history of the atomic bomb's creation and deployment, marking the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

April 12, 1945. Less than three months into his vice presidency, Harry Truman is catapulted into the Oval Office following the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. As he recites the oath, he learns a chilling secret known only to a select the United States is on the verge of deploying a weapon of unimaginable power. This weapon could end the war but also herald a new age of global fear and uncertainty.

Drawing from over twenty-five oral history archives across the US, Japan, and Europe, Graff has masterfully blended the memories and perspectives from key figures like Harry Truman and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the crews of the B-29 bombers, Enola Gay and Bock's Car, the rescuers who bravely faced the destruction, and the haunting stories of those at ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including the experiences of the hibakusha - the 'bomb-affected people'.

Enriched by memoirs, diaries, letters, official documents, and news reports, this is an immersive and deeply human account of the Manhattan Project through the end of World War II and the dawning of the Cold War, offering a vivid, multi-dimensional view of events that reshaped the world forever.

*New York Times #7 on the Hardcover Non-Fiction Chart, week of August 25th, 2025.]]> 608 Garrett M. Graff 1668092395 Pramit 0 to-read 4.51 2025 The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
author: Garrett M. Graff
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/09/26
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]]> Shantaram 33600
So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.

Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.

As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.

Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.]]> 936 Gregory David Roberts 192076920X Pramit 4 4.27 2003 Shantaram
author: Gregory David Roberts
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/09/22
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]]> The Death of Ivan Ilych 18386
How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.
A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.]]> 86 Leo Tolstoy Pramit 5 4.13 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilych
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1886
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/09/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (Pacific War Trilogy) by Ian W. Toll(2015-09-21)]]> 135683098 1 0 W. W. Norton & Company Pramit 4 4.52 The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (Pacific War Trilogy) by Ian W. Toll(2015-09-21)
author: W. W. Norton & Company
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/09/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945]]> 50896142 Twilight of the Gods is a riveting account of the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in atomic blasts.


Ian W. Toll’s narratives of combat in the air, at sea, and on the beaches are as gripping as ever, but he also takes the reader into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo, where the great questions of strategy and diplomacy were decided. Lionel Barber of the Financial Times chose the second volume of the series (The Conquering Tide) as the preemiment book of 2016, calling it “military history at its best.” Readers who have been waiting for the conclusion of Toll’s masterpiece will be thrilled by this final volume.]]> 944 Ian W. Toll 039308065X Pramit 5 4.74 2020 Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945
author: Ian W. Toll
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.74
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/09/21
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]]> This Is Your Mind on Plants 56015023 This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs--opium, caffeine, and mescaline--and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?]]> 288 Michael Pollan 0593296907 Pramit 3 3.86 2021 This Is Your Mind on Plants
author: Michael Pollan
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/09/21
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]]> Crime and Punishment 7144 671 Fyodor Dostoevsky Pramit 5 4.27 1866 Crime and Punishment
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1866
rating: 5
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]]> Lost Horizon 39092290 James Hilton’s bestselling adventure novel about a military man who stumbles on the world’s greatest hope for peace deep in Tibet: Shangri-La.

Hugh Conway saw humanity at its worst while fighting in the trenches of the First World War. Now, more than a decade later, Conway is a British diplomat serving in Afghanistan and facing war yet again—this time, a civil conflict forces him to flee the country by plane.
 
When his plane crashes high in the Himalayas, Conway and the other survivors are found by a mysterious guide and led to a breathtaking discovery: the hidden valley of Shangri-La.
 
Kept secret from the world for more than two hundred years, Shangri-La is like paradise—a place whose inhabitants live for centuries amid the peace and harmony of the fertile valley. But when the leader of the Shangri-La monastery falls ill, Conway and the others must face the daunting prospect of returning home to a world about to be torn open by war.
 
Thrilling and timeless, Lost Horizon is a masterpiece of modern fiction, and one of the most enduring classics of the twentieth century.
 ]]> 166 James Hilton Pramit 5 4.01 1933 Lost Horizon
author: James Hilton
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1933
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/09/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly]]> 33313 A deluxe, annotated edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, featuring new photo inserts

Over two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now iconic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation and megabestseller. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.

Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade, laying out Bourdain’s more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine. Including a handwritten introduction and annotations done by Bourdain about a decade after the book was originally published, this edition also features previously unpublished photos to accompany the now-classic text.]]> 312 Anthony Bourdain 0060899220 Pramit 0 to-read 4.19 2000 Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
author: Anthony Bourdain
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/09/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests]]> 199797714
One week in late 1999, more than 50,000 people converged on Seattle. Their to shut down the World Trade Organization conference and send a message that working-class people would not quietly accept the runaway economic globalization that threatened their livelihoods. Though their mission succeeded, it was not without blowback. Violent confrontations between police and protestors resulted in hundreds of arrests and millions of dollars in property damage. But the images of tear gas and smashed windows that flashed across TVs and newspapers were not an accurate representation of what actually happened that week.

In the oral history One Week to Change the World , award-winning journalist DW Gibson pieces together a complex and compelling account of what really went down in Seattle, immersing you in the angst that defined the end of a millennium, complete with fight clubs and Y2K doomsday scenarios. In more than 100 original interviews with protestors, police, politicians, anarchists, artists, activists, union members, and many others, Gibson reconstructs the events in gripping detail; documents its antecedents and aftermath; and shows how so many of its themes remain just as pressing today, including the vitalness and difficulty of grassroots activism, the aspirations and limitations of globalization, the militarization of policing, the sensationalism of the media, and the undeniable power of the people.

Timed to the 25th anniversary of the protests, this book is a page-turning drama, an essential history, and a practical handbook for how to make one’s voice heard.]]> 368 D.W. Gibson 1668033569 Pramit 0 to-read 4.24 One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests
author: D.W. Gibson
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/09/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization]]> 846249 593 Peter M. Senge 0385472560 Pramit 0 to-read 4.11 1994 The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization
author: Peter M. Senge
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 173 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Pramit 0 to-read 3.99 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Tempest 12985 • Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

• Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

• Scene-by-scene plot summaries

• A key to famous lines and phrases

• An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language

• An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play

• Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books


Alternate Cover/publisher Edition ISBN 0743482832 (ISBN13: 9780743482837)]]> 218 William Shakespeare Pramit 0 to-read 3.78 1611 The Tempest
author: William Shakespeare
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1611
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Afghans: Three Lives through War, Love, and Revolt]]> 219209830
I denne boka reiser Åsne Seierstad tilbake til Afghanistan, tjue år etter at hun skrev Bokhandleren i Kabul. Hun forteller historiene til dem som flyktet fra Taliban og dem som ble igjen. Det er historien om hvordan en jente som selv ble nektet utdanning bruker islam for å kjempe for kvinners rettigheter. Om en ung gutt som rømmer hjemmefra for å bli talibaner og kjempe i hellig krig. Og en jente som blir født når vestlige styrker inntar landet, og som tror at hun etter jusstudiene skal få jobbe og være en del av samfunnet.

Afghanerne er et nært portrett av tre mennesker som går hver sin vei og et land i krig.]]> 448 Åsne Seierstad 1639736263 Pramit 0 to-read 4.38 2022 The Afghans: Three Lives through War, Love, and Revolt
author: Åsne Seierstad
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/08/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Future of Life 183829 A magisterial accomplishment: both a moving description of our biosphere and a guidebook for the protection of all its species, including humankind.

From one of the world's most influential scientists (and two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author) comes his most timely and important book yet: an impassioned call for quick and decisive action to save Earth's biological heritage, and a plan to achieve that rescue.

Today we understand that our world is infinitely richer than was ever previously guessed. Yet it is so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the present century. These two contrasting truths—unexpected magnificence and underestimated peril—have become compellingly clear during the past two decades of research on biological diversity.

In this dazzlingly intelligent and ultimately hopeful book, Wilson describes what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose forever—in many cases animals, insects, and plants we have only just discovered, and whose potential to nourish us, protect us, and cure our illnesses is immeasurable—and what we can do to save them. In the process, he explores the ethical and religious bases of the conservation movement and deflates the myth that environmental policy is antithetical to economic growth by illustrating how new methods of conservation can ensure long-term economic well-being.

The Future of Life is a magisterial accomplishment: both a moving description of our biosphere and a guidebook for the protection of all its species, including humankind.]]> 220 Edward O. Wilson 0349115796 Pramit 5 4.16 2002 The Future of Life
author: Edward O. Wilson
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/07/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Letter from a region in my mind]]> 51202841 56 James Baldwin Pramit 0 4.58 Letter from a region in my mind
author: James Baldwin
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.58
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/12
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]]> East of Eden 4406
Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.]]> 601 John Steinbeck 0142000655 Pramit 0 to-read 4.44 1952 East of Eden
author: John Steinbeck
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Vintage)]]> 4364
As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.]]> 542 Suketu Mehta 0375703403 Pramit 4 3.94 2004 Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Vintage)
author: Suketu Mehta
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/06/13
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]]> <![CDATA[In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays]]> 135742 192 Bertrand Russell 0415109248 Pramit 0 4.13 1935 In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
author: Bertrand Russell
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1935
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph]]> 57936 784 T.E. Lawrence 0385418957 Pramit 0 to-read 3.89 1926 Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
author: T.E. Lawrence
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1926
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/08
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 332 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Pramit 0 to-read 4.15 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Bhowani Junction (Story-Tellers)]]> 2573025 It is one of John Masters' seven novels which followed several generations of the Savage family serving in the British Army in India.
Bhowani Junction is set in the wake of the partition of India, as the British prepare to withdraw from the newly independent country. Evoking the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the birth of modern India, the characters struggle to find their place in the new India that is emerging. In the last hectic days of the British Raj, Victoria has to choose between marrying a British Army officer or a Sikh, Ranjit, as she struggles to find her place in the new, independent India.
It is Masters' most famous novel, and was made into a film in 1956, starring Ava Gardener and Stewart Granger.

John Masters evokes the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the birth of modern India in his classic novel Bhowani Junction. Set in the late 1940's in the wake of partition it has become one of the great novels of India, alongside E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the work of Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie. In the last hectic days of the British Raj, as the British prepare to withdraw from India, Victoria has to choose between marrying a British Army officer or a Sikh, Ranjit, as she struggles to find her place in the new India that is emerging.]]> 416 John Masters 0285636049 Pramit 0 to-read, maybe 3.86 1954 Bhowani Junction (Story-Tellers)
author: John Masters
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, maybe
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]]> Running in the Family 5941 208 Michael Ondaatje Pramit 0 to-read 3.84 1982 Running in the Family
author: Michael Ondaatje
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/01
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]]> Flights 36885304 Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Here I am --
World in your head --
Your head in the world --
Syndrome --
Cabinet of curiosities --
Seeing is knowing --
Seven years of trips --
Guidance from Cioran --
Kunicki: water (I) --
Benedictus, quivenit]]> 416 Olga Tokarczuk 0525534199 Pramit 0 to-read 3.73 2007 Flights
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Elegy, Southwest 214152231 A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez.

In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis’s descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.

Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.]]> 288 Madeleine Watts 1668051621 Pramit 0 to-read 3.69 2025 Elegy, Southwest
author: Madeleine Watts
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents]]> 51152447 The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.]]> 544 Isabel Wilkerson 0593230256 Pramit 0 to-read 4.51 2020 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
author: Isabel Wilkerson
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Orthodoxy 87665 168 G.K. Chesterton 160096527X Pramit 0 to-read 4.18 1908 Orthodoxy
author: G.K. Chesterton
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1908
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Weight of Glory 29921671 208 C.S. Lewis Pramit 0 to-read 4.39 1949 The Weight of Glory
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Songs of Kabir 700480 117 Kabir 1406931853 Pramit 0 to-read 4.18 1448 Songs of Kabir
author: Kabir
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1448
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age]]> 216247514 From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal and provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language, and, if we let them, could steal it from us

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive teaching A.I.-powered machines to write and talk like human beings. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to get machines to communicate for us. But if this came to pass, would it be liberation or subjugation? 

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with this question. In 2021, she used a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the appeal and the danger of corporate-owned language machines, forced Vara to interrogate how technology has changed how she uses language, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to testing early versions of ChatGPT—all while adding to the trove of human-created material that Big Tech exploits. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral A.I. experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates Big Tech’s incursion into our lives, while proposing that by harnessing the collective imagination that taught us to communicate in the first place, we might invent a nobler, freer relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.]]> 352 Vauhini Vara 0593701526 Pramit 0 to-read 3.74 2025 Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
author: Vauhini Vara
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing]]> 55994102 A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction--the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management--that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation

Boeing is a century-old titan of American industry. The largest exporter in the US, it played a central role in the early days of commercial flight, World War II bombing missions, and moon landings. It remains a linchpin in the awesome routine of air travel today. But the two crashes of its 737 MAX 8, in 2018 and 2019, exposed a shocking pattern of malfeasance, leading to the biggest crisis in the company's history. How did things go so horribly wrong at Boeing?

Flying Blind is the definitive expos� of a corporate scandal that has transfixed the world. It reveals how a broken corporate culture paved the way for disaster, losses that were altogether avoidable. Drawing from aviation insiders, as well as exclusive interviews with senior Boeing staff, past and present, it shows how in its race to beat Airbus, Boeing skimped on testing, outsourced critical software to unreliable third-parties, and convinced regulators to put planes into service without properly equipping pilots to fly them. In the chill that it cast over its workplace, it offers a parable for a corporate America that puts the interests of shareholders over customers, employees, and communities.

This is a searing account of how a once-iconic company fell prey to a win-at-all-costs mentality, destabilizing an industry and needlessly sacrificing 350 lives.]]> 336 Peter Robison 0385546491 Pramit 3 4.12 2021 Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
author: Peter Robison
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2021
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility]]> 189989 Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life, the games we play in business and politics, in the bedroom and on the battlefied -- games with winners and losers, a beginning and an end. Infinite games are more mysterious -- and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom.
In this elegant and compelling work, James Carse explores what these games mean, and what they can mean to you. He offers stunning new insights into the nature of property and power, of culture and community, of sexuality and self-discovery, opening the door to a world of infinite delight and possibility.
"An extraordinary little book . . . a wise and intimate companion, an elegant reminder of the real."
-- Brain/Mind Bulletin]]> 180 James P. Carse 0345341848 Pramit 0 to-read 3.68 1986 Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
author: James P. Carse
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels]]> 130507
Author and travel writer Paul Theroux does what no one else he travels to the isolated, unusual, and fascinating spots of the world, and creates an elegy to them that makes readers feel they are traveling with him. Evocative, breathtaking, intriguing, here is the armchair traveler's guide to the sites of the world he makes us feel we know.

Praise for To the Ends of the Earth

“Reads like a wonderful novel.” — The Pittsburgh Press

“Powerful . . . This compendium unequivocally offers insight into the mind of a foremost American fiction writer who became an accidental tourist.” — The Christian Science Monitor

“Theroux is a wonderful traveling companion. . . . To the Ends of the Earth  combines the best of his travel writing. . . . With him the reader shares a conversation with a sultan on a polo ground in Malaysia; hears people ‘mourn with firecrackers, scattering cherrybombs on the tombstone’ in a Chinese cemetery in Singapore; feels overdressed around nudists in Corsica; sees sandbagged houses and bombcraters left in Vietnam on a cold December day in 1973.” — The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star

“Travel writing at its best . . . As you travel voyeuristically with Theroux, across the vast wastelands of interior China, the convoluted cultures of Latin America or campy seacoast towns of England, you're struck with his slightly jaundiced eye for the overlooked but telling detail, his skeptic's ear for the offhand but important comment.” — The Houston Post]]> 384 Paul Theroux 0804111227 Pramit 0 to-read 3.85 1980 To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels
author: Paul Theroux
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity]]> 215805908 How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case.

Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for two hundred years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village—has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum shows us that these problems have a common people can’t move as readily as they used to. They are, in a word, stuck.

Cutting through more than a century of mythmaking, Stuck tells a vivid, surprising story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis and lays out common-sense ways to get Americans moving again.]]> 320 Yoni Appelbaum 0593449290 Pramit 0 to-read 4.03 2025 Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
author: Yoni Appelbaum
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> The Undiscovered Self 67891 One of the world's greatest psychiatrists reveals how to embrace our own humanity and resist the pressures of an ever-changing world.

In this challenging and provocative work, Dr. Carl Jung—one of history's greatest minds—argues that civilization's future depends on our ability as individuals to resist the collective forces of society. Only by gaining an awareness and understanding of one's unconscious mind and true, inner nature—"the undiscovered self"—can we as individuals acquire the self-knowledge that is antithetical to ideological fanaticism. But this requires that we face our fear of the duality of the human psyche—the existence of good and the capacity for evil in every individual.

In this seminal book, Jung compellingly argues that only then can we begin to cope with the dangers posed by mass society—"the sum total of individuals"—and resist the potential threats posed by those in power.]]> 112 C.G. Jung 0451217322 Pramit 0 to-read 4.17 1961 The Undiscovered Self
author: C.G. Jung
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Atrocity Exhibition 70240 130 J.G. Ballard 1889307033 Pramit 0 to-read 3.80 1969 The Atrocity Exhibition
author: J.G. Ballard
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> <![CDATA[With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa]]> 771332

Now including a new introduction by Paul Fussell, With the Old Breed presents a stirring, personal account of the vitality and bravery of the Marines in the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1923 and raised on riding, hunting, fishing, and a respect for history and legendary heroes such as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene Bondurant Sledge (later called "Sledgehammer" by his Marine Corps buddies) joined the Marines the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and from 1943 to 1946 endured the events recorded in this book. In those years, he passed, often painfully, from innocence to experience.

Sledge enlisted out of patriotism, idealism, and youthful courage, but once he landed on the beach at Peleliu, it was purely a struggle for survival. Based on the notes he kept on slips of paper tucked secretly away in his New Testament, he simply and directly recalls those long months, mincing no words and sparing no pain. The reality of battle meant unbearable heat, deafening gunfire, unimaginable brutality and cruelty, the stench of death, and, above all, constant fear. Sledge still has nightmares about "the bloody, muddy month of May on Okinawa." But, as he also tellingly reveals, the bonds of friendship formed then will never be severed.

Sledge's honesty and compassion for the other marines, even complete strangers, sets him apart as a memoirist of war. Read as sobering history or as high adventure, With the Old Breed is a moving chronicle of action and courage.

]]> 326 Eugene B. Sledge 0195067142 Pramit 4 4.47 1981 With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
author: Eugene B. Sledge
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1981
rating: 4
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date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> No Longer Human 194746 No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston]]> 176 Osamu Dazai Pramit 0 to-read 3.96 1948 No Longer Human
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small]]> 583785 Book is in Good condition 316 John Gall 0961825170 Pramit 0 to-read 3.94 1977 The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small
author: John Gall
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City]]> 61097667
Emergent Tokyo answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo's most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets. Tokyo at its best offers a new vision for a human-scale urban ecosystem, where ordinary residents can shape their own environment in ways large and small, and communities take on a life of their own beyond government master planning and corporate profit-seeking. As Tokyoites ourselves, we uncover how five key features of Tokyo's cityscape - yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise neighborhoods - enable this 'emergent' urbanism, allowing the city to organize itself from the bottom up.

This book demystifies Tokyo's emergent urbanism for an international audience, explaining its origins, its place in today's Tokyo, and its role in the Tokyo of tomorrow. Visitors to Japan, architects, and urban policy practitioners alike will come away with a fresh understanding of the world's premier megacity - and a practical guide for how to bring Tokyo-style intimacy, adaptability, and spontaneity to other cities around the world.]]> 250 Jorge Almazán Pramit 0 to-read 4.46 2022 Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City
author: Jorge Almazán
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> A New Kind of Science 238558
Wolfram uses his approach to tackle a remarkable array of fundamental problems in science, from the origins of apparent randomness in physical systems, to the development of complexity in biology, the ultimate scope and limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, the interplay between free will and determinism, and the character of intelligence in the universe.]]> 1280 Stephen Wolfram 1579550088 Pramit 0 to-read 3.62 2002 A New Kind of Science
author: Stephen Wolfram
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> Bright Dead Things 24945396
A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact—tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker’s sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.]]> 105 Ada Limon 1571314717 Pramit 0 to-read 4.20 2015 Bright Dead Things
author: Ada Limon
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection]]> 23164946 From the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller The Untethered Soul comes this thought-provoking, inspirational memoir on the magic that happens when you just let go

Spirituality is meant to bring about harmony and peace. But the diversity of our philosophies, beliefs, concepts, and views about the soul often leads to confusion. To reconcile the noise that clouds spirituality, Michael Singer combines accounts of his own life journey to enlightenment—from his years as a hippie-loner to his success as a computer program engineer to his work in spiritual and humanitarian efforts—with lessons on how to put aside conflicting beliefs, let go of worries, and transform misdirected desires. Singer provides a road map to a new way of living not in the moment, but to exist in a state of perpetual happiness.]]> 252 Michael A. Singer 080414110X Pramit 0 to-read 4.00 2015 The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection
author: Michael A. Singer
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> Virgin Soil 781627 Virgin Soil, his biggest and most ambitious work, he sought to balance his deep affection for his country and his people, with his growing apprehensions about what their future held in store. At the heart of the book is the story of a young man and a young woman, torn between love and politics, who struggle to make headway against the complacency of the powerful, the inarticulate misery of the powerless, and the stifling conventions of provincial life. This rich and complex book, at once a love story, a devastating, and bitterly funny social satire, and, perhaps most movingly of all, a heartfelt celebration of the immense beauty of the Russian countryside, is a tragic masterpiece in which one of the world's finest novelists confronts the enduring question of the place of happiness in a political world.]]> 355 Ivan Turgenev 0940322455 Pramit 0 to-read 3.85 1877 Virgin Soil
author: Ivan Turgenev
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1877
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign (Vintage Departures)]]> 131103 But the true subject of Sun After Dark is the dislocations of the mind in transit. And so Iyer takes us along to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk geopolitics with the Dalai Lama. He navigates the Magritte-like landscape of jet lag, “a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago.” And on every page of this poetic and provocative book, he compels us to redraw our map of the world.]]> 240 Pico Iyer 1400031036 Pramit 0 to-read 3.71 2004 Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign (Vintage Departures)
author: Pico Iyer
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters]]> 186538 In Xanadu, became an instant backpacker's classic, winning a stream of literary prizes. City of Djinns and From the Holy Mountain soon followed, to universal critical praise. Yet it is India that Dalrymple continues to return to in his travels, and his fourth book, The Age of Kali, is his most reflective book to date.

The result of 10 year's living and traveling throughout the Indian subcontinent, The Age of Kali emerges from Dalrymple's uneasy sense that the region is slipping into the most fearsome of all epochs in ancient Hindu cosmology: "the Kali Yug, the Age of Kali, the lowest possible throw, an epoch of strife, corruption, darkness, and disintegration." "The brilliance of this book lies in its refusal to reflect any cultural pessimism. Dalrymple's love for the subcontinent, and his feel for its diverse cultural identity, comes across in every page, which makes its chronicles of political corruption, ethnic violence, and social disintegration all the more poignant. The scope of the book is particularly impressive, from the vivid opening chapters portraying the lawless caste violence of Bihar, to interviews with the drug barons on the North-West Frontier, and Dalrymple's extraordinary encounter with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Some of the most fascinating sections of the book are Dalrymple's interviews with Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, which read like nonfiction companion pieces to Salman Rushdie's bitterly satirical Shame. The Age of Kali is a dark, disturbing book that takes the pulse of a continent facing some tough questions. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk]]> 394 William Dalrymple 1864501723 Pramit 0 to-read 3.99 1998 The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters
author: William Dalrymple
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> <![CDATA[The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress]]> 2443 560 Mark Twain 0812967054 Pramit 0 to-read 3.83 1869 The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress
author: Mark Twain
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1869
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East]]> 131107 400 Pico Iyer 0679722165 Pramit 0 to-read 3.86 1988 Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East
author: Pico Iyer
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/10
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]]> The Tale of Genji 7042 1182 Murasaki Shikibu 014243714X Pramit 0 to-read 3.71 1000 The Tale of Genji
author: Murasaki Shikibu
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1000
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> Moby-Dick or, The Whale 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 Pramit 0 to-read 3.55 1851 Moby-Dick or, The Whale
author: Herman Melville
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1851
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory]]> 925533
This unabridged reproduction of the 1896 edition of lectures delivered at Harvard College is a study of "why, when, and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfill to be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible of beauty, and what the relation is between the constitution of the object and the excitement of our susceptibility."

Santayana first analyzes the nature of beauty, finding it irrational, "pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing." He then proceeds to the materials of beauty, showing what all human functions can contribute: love, social instincts, senses, etc. Beauty of form is then analyzed, and finally the author discusses the expression of beauty. Literature, religion, values, evil, wit, humor, and the possibility of finite perfection are all examined. Presentation throughout the work is concrete and easy to follow, with examples drawn from art, history, anthropology, psychology, and similar areas.]]> 192 George Santayana 0486202380 Pramit 0 to-read 3.94 1896 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory
author: George Santayana
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1896
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Theory of Games and Economic Behavior]]> 483055

This sixtieth anniversary edition includes not only the original text but also an introduction by Harold Kuhn, an afterword by Ariel Rubinstein, and reviews and articles on the book that appeared at the time of its original publication in the New York Times , tthe American Economic Review , and a variety of other publications. Together, these writings provide readers a matchless opportunity to more fully appreciate a work whose influence will yet resound for generations to come.]]> 776 John von Neumann 0691130612 Pramit 0 to-read 4.14 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
author: John von Neumann
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1944
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Human Nature: A Walking History Of The Himalayan Landscape]]> 220139660 Brand New Thomas Bell 0143467123 Pramit 0 3.30 Human Nature: A Walking History Of The Himalayan Landscape
author: Thomas Bell
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.30
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> No Full Stops in India 791184
'The ten essays, written with clarity, warmth of feeling and critical balance and understanding, provide as lively a view as one can hope for of the panorama of India.’ K. Natwar-Singh in the Financial Times]]> 336 Mark Tully 0140104801 Pramit 0 3.81 1991 No Full Stops in India
author: Mark Tully
name: Pramit
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders]]> 28110891
Here are natural wonders – the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that’s so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M. C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils vault over rows of squirming infants.

Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan’s 45-year hole of fire called the Door to Hell, hanging coffins suspended off a cliff face in the Philippines, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.

More cabinet of curiosities than traditional guidebook, Atlas Obscura revels in the unexpected, the overlooked, the bizarre, and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, and maps for every region of the world, it is a book you can open anywhere. But with caution: It’s almost impossible not to turn to the next entry, and the next, and the next.

Let your curiosity be your compass.]]> 470 Joshua Foer 0761169083 Pramit 0 to-read 4.22 2016 Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
author: Joshua Foer
name: Pramit
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/14
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]]>