
My favourite books among the English ones I’ve read in the last 5 years. Level 1 students need to read a new book and write a synopsis for the communications skills module. Recommending these as a part of suggestions.
Fiction

- Pillars of the earth - historic novel set in medieval times
- Winter of the World - historic novel, WW2
- End of Eternity - Sci-fi, Asimov
- Space Odessey - Sci-fi, Arthur C Clarke
- Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - a masterpiece in comedy [my bible]
- Discworld Series (Mort, Guards Guards) - Fantasy
- 1984 - popular novel set in a dystopian dictatorship
- Jam Fruit Tree - set in Burgher community in Colombo in 1930s, enjoyable
- The Road from Elephant Pass - Sri Lankan, really good, unbiased political analysis
- The Book Thief
- Tau Zero - hard sci-fi
- Foundation series - Asimov, sci-fi
- A Thousand Splendid Suns - story of two women in Afghanistan
- Gone girl
Non-Fiction

- Sapiens - a brief history of mankind
- Algorithms to Live by - interesting book on algos in real life
- Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman - interesting stories from Feynman’s colourful life
- Going Solo - interesting stories from Roald Dahl’s life
- Our Inner Ape - sociology of our primate relatives (bonobos, chimps) and parallels to ours.
- Idea Factory: Bell Labs and Great Age of American Innovation - fascinating story of how 4 years of ENTC curriculum was invented in one building
- QED, the Jewel of Physics - Pop-sci lectures of Feynman for laymen on Quantum Mechanics
- Sophies’ World - History of western philosophy, as a novel
- Why Buildings Stand Up - structural engineering for laymen
Some quotes from Sapiens:
“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”
My reading list (want to read soon):
- The Why Axis - why well-intended policies backfire
- Euler’s gem
- How to lie with statistics
- When Einstien Walked with Godel
- The Numbers Behind Numb3rs - Forensic mathematics
- Good Omens
- The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - stories of a famous psychologist
- How to Invent Everything
- Statistics Done Wrong
- The Ringworld Throne - sci-fi
- This Divided Island
- Thinking in Systems
- Misbehaving: Making of Behavioral Economics
- Fahrenheit 451
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
- Pride and Prejudice
- The Information Theory
- Weapons of Math Destruction - side effects of algorithms that are used every day
- Martian
- The Practice of Creativity: A Manual for Dynamic Group Problem-Solving
The list doesn’t include technical books such as SystemVerilog, Clean Code, Pro Git…etc.
First posted on facebook: facebook.com/abarajithan11/posts/10222051686472695