10 Favourite Books of All Time (Evolving)
My 10 favorite books of all time.
10. The Histories (430 BC) by Herodotus
Back in 430 BC, the historian's word was truth: there was no proof reading, no fact checking, and no bias handling. This book has dog-headed soldiers at war with "civilised" Greeks, caricatured portrayals of individuals that Herodotus had an axe to grind with, and some bizarre accounts of the East. You can read The Histories as a deep dive into the collective psyche of a people yet to be disillusioned by science or as a work of magical realism—it is a titillating experience either way.
9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera
This text is a delicate tango between post-modern literature and existential philosophy. Kundera zooms in on micro concepts such as the beauty of the human body and the streets of Prague, and ties them to macro concepts like political idealism and the gravity of choices in an eternally recurrent universe. It is a difficult thing to pull off without sounding pretentious or shallow but within his delicious prose and the context of several beautiful, multi-faceted characters, the book does not sound so.
8. Second Person Singular (2011) by Sayed Kashua
This novel was my first foray into Israel, Palestine, and the various identity- and geo-politics of the region—and it left me with more questions than answers regarding both. Kashua slowly unfolds a story that explores infidelity, inter-race jealousy, and masculinity through narrative shifts between two protagonists: with a first-person perspective for one and in the third-person for the other.
If you have ever lived as an ethnic minority, you will relate a lot to the two protagonists. Hopefully, you find some soothing humour and catharsis while reading through their struggles.
This text is also a spiritual successor to The Kreutzer Sonata — the next book on this list!
7. The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) by Leo Tolstoy
Read this and Vladmir Nabokov will forever seem like an amateur to you. Tolstoy portrays the mind of an intellectual and charming psychopath so well that you actually end up rooting for them—until a certain twist happens in the novel that I would not dare spoil.
The writing is often witty, sometimes melancholic, and at special moments, immensely manic—exploring a psyche teetering on the edge of madness.
6. The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
To think that an unfinished book left such a lasting impression on me—yes, Kafka passed away before he could complete the novella.
The Trial is a psychoactive text: there are maze-like, circular descriptions of bureaucratic infrastructures that mirror the protagonist, K's own labyrinthian experience with the law; eccentric characters seated in Eldritch-filthy rooms with baroque paintings hanging on the walls; and legal advice equivalent to a snake eating its own tail.
This would have been a very depressing book if it was not for K's witty and almost deadpan way of observing the convoluted and antagonistic world around him, giving the text an absurdist quality that made me chuckle then and there.
5. Free Will (2012) by Sam Harris
The central thesis of this book is that decisions, choices, and actions are results of multiple data-processing that happen within the subconscious parts of your brain, essentially suggesting that you have no free will—and it provides both neuroscience case studies and philosophy of mind thought experiments to prove this point.
This book made me a more sympathetic person, in general. I now think of the circumstances that surround a person's actions—their childhood, past traumas, mental illnesses, etc etc—and I am not as quick to value judge them. And for that, I am eternally thankful to Sam Harris.
4. The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene fundamentally changed the way I perceive life-forms: from autonomous creatures that use genes as a mechanism to create progeny, to automatons created, programmed and used by genes for their own survival through time.
Dawkins provides case study after case study to prove this point, from detailing how replicators—RNA—are the origin of all life, to proving how a bee hive is equivalent to one single life form, and using game theory to suggest how reciprocative aggression is a successful evolutionary strategy.
This is the most groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting text I have had the pleasure to read and I encourage everyone to check it out!
3. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
Fun fact: this is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre from the perspective of Rochester's locked-up Creole wife, Bertha. Rhys does so to shed light on the sexist aspects of colonialism and its remnants in the post-colonial world. Bertha—or if we go by her birth name, Antoinette—has her land, people, and name stolen by the white Rochester, thereby turning Brontë's idea of a victimised white-man forcibly married to a mad native-woman on its head.
If you have read Jane Eyre, you would know that things don't end well for Bertha but Rhys' story stresses the importance of struggling against odds to take ownership of our own narrative in the face of all-consuming forces like colonialism and capitalism.
2. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
This novella taught me that plot is not necessary for a good story; you just need good prose, particularity of details, and deep characters.
Unstructured thoughts, mistakes in memory when it comes to details of people and setting, and multiple self-contradictions make this text a post-modernist masterpiece: while you read The Odyssey, you observe Odysseus inside a world, while in Mrs. Dalloway, the character of Mrs. Dalloway is the world.
Mrs. Dalloway is a flawed and beautiful character, and it is an absolute joy to sink deep into her psyche through the course of this text.
1. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Reading this book made me fear capitalism; a crippling fear that I have yet to recover from.
This absurdist novella about a man turning into a beetle is a sad metaphor for the mentally and physically challenged living in a society where their self-worth is measured by their economic output. The protagonist, however, is a funny man—very witty and observant. The way he responds to his tragedy is charming and it is very hard to not root for him.
All in all, an expertly written text that feels almost prescient in today's context.