A year (and a bit more) in books

2021 was a tough year, generally speaking. So I have a lot to be grateful about to my public library memberships that gave me access to a wealth of books in electronic and audio formats over the past thirteen odd months. Here is a list of the (strictly non-academic) books that I read (including three that I re-read), in no-particular order, that eased me into pockets of positivity when the rest of the world felt like Dante’s ninth circle of hell. In parenthesis, is my one word recommendation (skip or read) for each.

• Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell (skip)
• The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (read)
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (skip)
• Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (skip)
• Mythos by Stephen Fry (read)
• Hello Bastar by Rahul Pandita (read)
• Humans by Tom Philips (skip)
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (read)
• The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich (read)
• Malice by Keigo Higashino (read)
• I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (read)
• The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (read)
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (read)
• A Sense of Style by Steven Pinker (skip)
• Dune by Frank Herbert (read)
• Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert (read)
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (skip)
• Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee (read)
• Six Impossible Things by John Gribbin (skip)
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (skip)
• Entanglement by Amir Aczel (read)