29. PVK Blog Post Book Lists.
1. The Literature of fact: A short reading list
Frazer, J. G. ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion’. London: Macmillan and Co, 1922.
Woolf, Virginia. ‘A Room of One’s Own’. (1928) Harmondsworth (UK): Penguin, 1972.
Basham, A. L. ‘The Wonder that Was India’. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954.
Wiesel, Elie. ‘Night’. London: (1972). (Translated from the French by Marion Wiesel.) New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.
Levi, Primo. ‘The Periodic Table’. (Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal). New York: Shocken, 1975.
Keay, John. ‘India Discovered: The Recovery of a Lost Civilization’. Leicester, UK,1981.
Searle, John. ‘Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures’. London, 1989.
Varghese, Abraham. ‘My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS’. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
David Quammen. ‘The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction’. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Diamond, Jared. ‘Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years’. London: Vintage, 1997.
Nanda, Meera. ‘Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays’. New Delhi: Three Essays, 2002.
Steven D Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. ‘Freakonomics: A Rouge Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything’. New York: William Morrow, 2006.
Pollan, Michael. ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World’. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
Rushby, Kevin. ‘Paradise: The History of the Idea that Rules the World’. London: Robinson, 2006.
Flanagan, Owen. ‘The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World’.New York: OUP, 2007.
Pinker, Steven. ‘The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature’. London: Penguin, 2007.
Albinia, Alice. ‘Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River’. London: John Murray, 2008.
Naomi Klein. ‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism’. New York: Henry Holt, 2008.
Goldacre, Ben. ‘Bad Science’. London: Fourth Estate, 2009.
Roach, Mary. ‘Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science’. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.
McKibben, Bill. ‘Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet’. New York: Henry Holton, 2010.
Flannery, Tim. ‘Here on Earth: A New Beginning’. London: Penguin, 2010.
Greenblat, Stephen. ‘The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began’. London: Bodley Head, 2011.
Kahneman, Daniel. ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. London: Allen Lane, 2011.
Anderson, Perry. ‘The Indian Ideology’. Gurgaon: The Three Essays, 2012.
Ratna, Kalpish. ‘Once Upon a Hill’. Noida, Harper Collins, 2012.
Paul Thagard. ‘The Brain and the Meaning of Life’. New York: OUP, 2012.
Monbiot, George. ‘Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding’. London: 2013.
David Walther-Toews. ‘The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society’. Tornonto, E C W Press, 2013.
Gaia Vince. ‘Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made.’ London: Vintage, 2014.
Subramaniam, Meera. ‘Elemental India: The Natural World in Crisis’. Gurgaon: Harper Collins, 2015.
Trautmann. Thomas R. ‘Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History’. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2015.
Wootton, David . ‘The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution’. London: Allen Lane, 2015.
Natarajan, Privamvada. ‘Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos’. Yale: Yale UP, 2016.
Wilson, Edward O. ‘Half -Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life’. New York: W W Norton, 2016.
Greenfield, Adam. ‘Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life’. London: Verso, 2017.
Wu, Tim. ‘The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention is Harvested and Sold’. London: Atlantic, 2017.
Amrith, Sunil. ‘Unruly Waters: How Mountains Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asian History’. London, Allen Lane, 2018.
Damasio, Antonio. ‘The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Culture’. New York: Pantheon, 2018.
Pyenson, Nick. ‘Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures’. New York: Viking, 2018.
Wohlleben, Peter. ‘The Secret Network of Nature: The Delicate Balance of All Living Things’. London: Vintage, 2018.
Dartnell, Lewis. ‘Origins: How the Earth Made Us’. 2019. London: Bodley Head, 2019.
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. ‘Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It’. London: Simon and Schuster, 2019.
Macfarlane, Robert. ‘Underland: A Deep Time Journey’. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019.
McIntyre, Lee. The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud and Pseudoscience. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2019.
Spears, Dean. ‘Air: Pollution, Climate Change and India’s Choice between Policy and Pretence’. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2019.
De Waal, Frans. ‘Mama’s Last Laugh: Animal Emotions and What They Teach Us about Ourselves’. New York: W W Norton, 2019.
Henrich,V. ‘The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. London: Allen Lane, 2020.
Michael J, Sandel, ‘The Tyranny of Merit: What Became of the Common Good’. London: Allen Lane, 2020.
Wilkerson, Isabel. ‘Caste: The Lies that Divide Us’. London: Allen Lane, 2020.
Arora, Namit. ‘Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization’. Noida: Three Essays Collective, 2021.
Ramesh, Jairam. ‘The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined the Buddha’. New Delhi, Penguin, 2021.
Note: This was a reading list I gave a small set of PG students of the Trivandrum Medical College. Amogh, a close friend and the son of my distant relative and friend since my teens, Dr Jayaprasad, had invited me to address the students, knowing that I read far beyond English literature.
I had titled the list “Outside the Bubble: Literature of Fact for Medicos’.
I included six short novels to the list, books I thought were essential reading for an educated person. They were:
Voltaire: ‘Candide, or Optimism’ (1759)
Charles Dickens: ‘Oliver Twist’ (1838)
Mulk Raj Anand. ‘Coolie’. (1936)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. ‘A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’. (1962)
Rohinton Mistry. ‘Such a Long Journey’ (1991)
Gabrial Garcia Marquez. ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ (1983).
People bemoan the supposed fact that reading has declined and is on its way out. But I think they are wrong. At least in Trivandrum and Kerala. One visit to Modern Book Depot in Trivandrum will convince you that you are wrong. One of the most encouraging things is whole families walking in and each person selecting books.
Very often, those of my charming, beautiful and extremely talented wife, Khyrunnisa A.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
profpvk@gmail.com
Thank you. Nandri. Namaskaram.
PVK 09/June/2026.
PVK's Book mark 