No affiliate links, no Goodreads spin. Just two honest stacks — the books we’ve already finished, and the ones still waiting for a long flight or a quiet Sunday.
Heavy on Amish’s Shiva and Ram Chandra series, a long Murakami phase, the full Kawaguchi “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” quartet, and a handful of business and biography reads we picked up between flights.
If you spot a favourite of yours in the stack, tell us what we should read next.
Ram as a flawed, rule-bound prince rather than a perfect god. Made us re-read the Ramayana with kinder eyes for everyone in it.
Sita is finally an agent, not an ornament. A reminder that the women in our epics were always more interesting than the retellings let on.
Villains have logic too. Brilliance turned bitter by grief — uncomfortable to read, harder to dismiss.
Even a just war costs everyone something. The book lingers on the price rather than the victory.
“Evil” usually turns out to be people we never bothered to understand. A lesson that applied far outside the book.
Doing the right thing rarely looks heroic in the moment. Shiva’s final choice still sits with us.
A slice of Indian history we were never taught in school. Made us look up Bahraich on a map.
A fun Dan Brown-style thriller built on Indian mythology. Light reading, but it sparks real curiosity about Ashoka.
The Mahabharata in Draupadi’s voice — suddenly the whole epic reads differently. The book that changed how we listen to old stories.
Two thousand years old and still painfully accurate about people, money, and power. We dog-eared half of it.
Grief as something you carry quietly, not perform. The book that opened the door to everything else Murakami for us.
A reminder that a story doesn’t owe you a tidy ending. Strange in the best way.
A single Tokyo night, told like a film. Made us see late-night cafes as their own kind of country.
Seven studies of loneliness, none of them dramatic. The kind of book that makes you call an old friend.
A small Tokyo bookshop, small days, small repairs. Proof that nothing dramatic has to happen for a story to matter.
Time travel with strict rules and a cooling cup of coffee. You can’t change the past — only what you carry forward.
More short visits to the same cafe, more small reconciliations. Comfort reading in the truest sense.
Same conceit, new city, same gentle gut-punch. We cried twice and aren’t embarrassed about it.
The series’ quiet thesis: the words we don’t say are the ones we end up rereading. Pack tissues.
Devastating. A book about friendship that quietly redefines what you owe the people you love.
A novel about a woman walking through her own city, noticing. A masterclass in stillness.
If today were your last, would you actually live it? A YA premise that doesn’t feel YA at all.
The Sundarbans as a character of their own. Made us want to travel slower and ask better questions of locals.
An early-2000s comfort read. Easy to dismiss now, but it’s how a generation of Indian readers fell in love with reading at all.
Holmes is sharper, ruder and funnier on the page than any adaptation. Still the gold standard for clever short fiction.
Stories that feel impossibly modern for their age. Empathy as a literary skill.
A useful sampler of new Indian voices. Some misses, several that we’ve since followed online.
The kind of book everyone is told to read and most people put off. We finally read it and were quieter for a week.
Ambition without ego, almost embarrassing in its decency. A useful corrective to most modern memoirs.
A young man’s friendship with Ratan Tata, told without trying to sound wise. Short, warm, surprisingly moving.
Pure nostalgia. A reminder that books used to be just… fun, before we tried to extract a lesson from every one of them.
Behaviour beats spreadsheets. The single book that changed how we argue about money as a couple.
Imperfect and dated in places, but the assets-vs-liabilities mental model genuinely sticks.
Honest about the price working women pay, in a way most CEO memoirs aren’t. Should be mandatory for managers.
Less hero-worship than you’d expect. A useful study in obsession and the human cost it leaves around it.
Self-help dressed as fable. Read it young; the principles are simpler than the prose pretends.
A one-hour read with a single useful idea: notice the change earlier than feels comfortable.
Where humans go after we solve famine, plague and war. Provocative, occasionally infuriating, never boring.
Short biographies of Indian women in science. The next generation should grow up knowing every one of these names.
The honest pile. Bought on impulse at airport bookstores, gifted by friends who knew our taste, ordered after a podcast we agreed with. We try to clear at least one a month between work, travel, and writing this site.
Heavy lean towards Harari, Bryson and Murakami waiting in the wings — plus a whole spirituality stack from Pranay’s series and a long-overdue investing shelf.
If you’ve read something from the right stack — tell us which one we should pick up next.
Recommend a book