The picture above shows the actual books I have. I made this photograph today (13th Nov, 2023). I replaced the borrowed picture.
I recently noted couple of posts on this website about books (both technical and non-technical). I had some thoughts and I am writing this about what books I had read in the past 10 years or so. I had written this in one sitting and without any plan on how to organize the list and what to write.
I have been reading books of English language (mostly fiction) actively since I was in college. There is no specific pattern - I had read books as and I felt like. There were stretches of months and years I had not read any books.
In the past decade I had been reading little bit and here are some of those books. These include fictional, non-fictional and software related.
When I had an urge or time to read I found the books from various sources. Popular books lists, physical book stores, online book stores, libraries, references from other books or talks, book reviews, and also for specific purpose (this last category applies mostly to my profession).
These books include eBooks and paperbacks.
Some books are freely sourced (these are mostly from online resources like libraries), others purchased and few borrowed.
Some of these are re-reads.
Some of these are sitting on my bookshelf and some on my computer's hard drive or in the cloud.
So, what are these books? I will touch on some of them and the experience from what I can recollect now. The list is in alphabetical order by author under each category.
Free eBooks
These are a list of eBooks from free online sources. Most of these books are from the Project Gutenberg (it is an online library of free eBooks). The books are mostly fictional and popular classics. I have mentioned one book per author, but often it is more than one I had read from the same author.
- Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
- Anton Chekov (Short Stories)
- Arthur Canon Doyle (stories about the Sherlock Holmes) - this is a re read for 3rd or 4th time
- Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
- D. H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers) - I had read the other book, the famous and once banned book - The Lady Chatterley's Lover.
- Darwin, Charles (The Voyage of the Beagle)
- E.M. Foster (A Room with a View) - I had watched the movie too.
- Franz Kafka (Metamorphosis)
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Brothers Karamazov)
- G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Knew Too Much)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
- George Eliot (Middlemarch)
- H. G. Wells (War of the Worlds)
- Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin)
- Jack London (Call of the Wild) - I had read the White Fang long time back.
- James Joyce (The Dubliners) - I had read the Ulysses too (by the same author).
- Kate Chopin (The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories)
- L. M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)
- Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
- Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the wind) - This one I had found in an online book library from Australia.
- Mark Twain (Adventures of Tom Sawyer) - this was a re read for the 3rd time.
- Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote)
- Nevil Shute (Trustee from Toolroom) - This I found from a reference in another book.
- Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
- P. G. Wodehouse (My Man Jeeves)
- Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island)
- Rudyard Kipling (The Man Who Would Be King)
- Shaw, Bernard (Pygmalion)
- William Shakesphere (Much Ado about Nothing) - Yes, I had watched the movie, first.
Fictional eBooks
- Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
- J. D. Salinger (Catcher on the Rye)
- Larry McMurty (Lonesome Dove) - A long story about cowboys.
- Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth) - A story of rural Chinese people and their lives during 20th century
Fictional Paperbacks
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The First Circle) - A Russian language book translated to English. I came to know about this book from its reference in another book.
- Alex Haley (Roots).
- Banana Yoshimoto (Kitchen) - An English translation of a Japanese book.
- Eleanor H. Porter (Polyanna) - Had picked up at a bookstore casually. It is about an orphaned child.
- Fuminori Nakamura (The Thief) - An English translation of a Japanese book. Had picked up at a book store casually. This book is a hard cover.
- J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit) - I haven't read the LOTR, yet.
- James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy) - I came to know about this book as I watched the move made from this book at a retreat.
- Jandy Nelson (I'll Give You the Sun) - This is one of the most recent reads. This is a story about teenagers.
- O. Henry (100 Selected Stories) - Had picked up in an online store casually. I had liked its colorful cover - An Illustration of Manhattan. The book is all short stories. It has a beautiful story called as "The Gift of the Magi".
- Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a story) - Small book under 90 pages. Had picked up in an online store casually. Had read it more than once.
- Ruzbeh N. Bharucha (The Fakir) - Came to know about the book from a library.
- Saul Bellow (Herzog) - Came to know about this book from a book listing.
- Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye) - Had picked up at a bookstore casually.
- W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage) - Had picked up at a bookstore casually.
Non Fiction Books
These are related to psychology, self help, biography, philosophy and religion. All are paperbacks, except the Quiet and Walden which I got from the iTunes store. Walden was a free copy.
- Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris) - It is about books, reading books and the experience.
- Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
- Carlo Rovelli (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics)
- Dacher Keltner (Born to be Good) - This book is about human feelings.
- David Herbert Donald (Lincoln) - A bigraphical book on Abraham Lincoln.
- Ekhart Tolle (The Power of Now) - Teachings from a contemporary spiritual teacher.
- Eknath Eswaran (The Dhammapada) - This is about Lord Buddha's teachings.
- Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli (Cities and Canopies - Trees in Indian Cities)
- His Holiness Dalai Lama of Tibet (Freedom in Exile) - An autobiographical book.
- J. Krishnamurti (Happy is the Man who is Nothing - Letters to a Young Friend) - A tiny book of less than 70 pages.
- James Allen (A Man Thinketh)
- James Doty (Into the Magic Shop) - A biographical book, I came to know about from an interview the author had given in a wellness magazine. One of my recent reads.
- M. K. Gandhi (My Experiments with Truth) - An autobiographical book.
- Malcolm Gladwell (What the Dog Saw) - Came to know about the book from a library and had found the title rather amusing.
- Max Muller (Ramakrishna, his life and sayings)
- Michael Singer (The Untethered Soul - A journey beyond yourself) - This is one of those books I haven't completed reading yet, though I got it couple of years back.
- Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom) - An autobiographical book.
- Paul Pearsall (The Heart's Code) - A beautiful book about human heart (the physical heart too).
- Susan Cain (Quiet) - This book is to get to know more about quiet people.
- Swami Vivekananda (Complete works - 9 volumes) - These I read over a period of 10 months.
- Thomas A. Harris (I'm Ok. You're OK)
- Thoreau, Henry David (Walden)
Poetry
Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali) - This is the only poetry book I had ever read (other than from the school text books). This is a paperback I had purchased from a bookstore rather casually.
Books on Software
This list does not specify the author and the title of the books. It is a general listing of topics only.
- Programming: Java EE, Java 7, 8 and 9, Spring, JavaServer Faces, Haskell, Golang, NodeJS, JavaScript, HTML & CSS, Hadoop, MySQL.
- Software Engineering: Data Structures & Algorithms, Unit Testing, Refactoring, Clean Code, Object Oriented Analysis & Design, UML.
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