Things I have read, am reading, or keep returning to.

Last updated: 2026

Study & Reference

Books

  • Algorithm Design - Jon Kleinberg & Éva Tardos
  • The Algorithm Design Manual - Steven Skiena
  • Algorithms - Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou & Umesh Vazirani
  • Aptitude Test Problems in Physics - S. Krotov
  • The Art of Computer Programming - Donald E. Knuth
  • Campbell Biology - Neil A. Campbell
  • The C Programming Language - Brian W. Kernighan & Dennis M. Ritchie
  • Calculus - Tom Apostol
  • Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics - Krishnamurthy, Pranesachar, Ranganathan & Venkatachala
  • Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
  • Competitive Programmer’s Handbook - Antti Laaksonen
  • Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach - John L. Hennessy & David A. Patterson
  • Computer Networks - Andrew S. Tanenbaum & David J. Wetherall
  • Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective - Randal E. Bryant & David R. O’Hallaron
  • Concepts of Physics - H.C. Verma
  • Concrete Mathematics - Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth & Oren Patashnik
  • Cracking the Coding Interview - Gayle Laakmann McDowell
  • Database Internals - Alex Petrov
  • Deep Learning - Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio & Aaron Courville
  • Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson & John Vlissides
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann
  • Designing Machine Learning Systems - Chip Huyen
  • Differential Equations - Shepley L. Ross
  • Digital Design - Morris Mano & Michael Ciletti
  • Distributed Computing: Principles, Algorithms, and Systems - Ajay D. Kshemkalyani & Mukesh Singhal
  • The Elements of Coordinate Geometry - S.L. Loney
  • The Elements of Statistical Learning - Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani & Jerome Friedman
  • An Excursion in Mathematics - Modak, Katre, Acharya & Abhyankar
  • An Infinitely Large Napkin - Evan Chen
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton & Matthew Sands
  • Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions - Frederick Mosteller
  • A First Course in Probability - Sheldon Ross
  • Fundamentals of Physics - David Halliday, Robert Resnick & Jearl Walker
  • Game Theory and Mechanism Design - Y. Narahari
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter
  • Graph Theory - Frank Harary
  • Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning - Miguel Morales
  • Higher Algebra - Hall & Knight
  • The IMO Compendium - Djukić, Janković, Matić & Petrović
  • Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms - David J.C. MacKay
  • Introduction to Algorithms - Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest & Clifford Stein
  • Introduction to Multi-Armed Bandits - Aleksandrs Slivkins
  • Introduction to Quantum Mechanics - David J. Griffiths
  • An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers - Ivan Niven, Herbert S. Zuckerman & Hugh Montgomery
  • Introduction to Linear Algebra - Gilbert Strang
  • Linear Algebra Done Right - Sheldon Axler
  • Mathematical Olympiad Challenges - Titu Andreescu & Razvan Gelca
  • Mathematical Olympiad Treasures - Titu Andreescu & Bogdan Enescu
  • The Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
  • Operating System Concepts - Silberschatz, Galvin & Gagne
  • Open Data Structures (in C++) - Pat Morin
  • Organic Chemistry - Jonathan Clayden, Nick Greeves & Stuart Warren
  • Organic Chemistry - Robert T. Morrison & Robert N. Boyd
  • A Path to Combinatorics for Undergraduates - Titu Andreescu & Zuming Feng
  • Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning - Christopher Bishop
  • A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews - Xinfeng Zhou
  • The Pragmatic Programmer - David Thomas & Andrew Hunt
  • Principles of Mathematical Analysis - Walter Rudin
  • Probabilistic Graphical Models - Daphne Koller & Nir Friedman
  • Probability and Statistics - Morris H. DeGroot & Mark J. Schervish
  • Problem Solving Strategies - Arthur Engel
  • Problems from the Book - Titu Andreescu & Gabriel Dospinescu
  • Problems in General Physics - I.E. Irodov
  • Programming Pearls - Jon Bentley
  • Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction - Richard S. Sutton & Andrew G. Barto
  • Site Reliability Engineering - Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff & Niall Richard Murphy
  • Software Engineering at Google - Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck & Hyrum Wright
  • Straight from the Book - Titu Andreescu & Gabriel Dospinescu
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Harold Abelson & Gerald Jay Sussman

Other Resources

General Reading

Classics

  • Animal Farm - George Orwell
  • Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
  • Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
  • Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
  • Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
  • Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
  • Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
  • Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  • Hamlet - William Shakespeare
  • Heidi - Johanna Spyri
  • Journey to the Center of the Earth - Jules Verne
  • King Lear - William Shakespeare
  • Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
  • Lord of the Flies - William Golding
  • Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
  • Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
  • Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
  • Selected Stories - Anton Chekhov
  • Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
  • The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • The Canterville Ghost - Oscar Wilde
  • The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
  • The Enchanted Wood - Enid Blyton
  • The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
  • The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
  • The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum
  • Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
  • To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
  • White Nights - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Fiction

  • 1984 - George Orwell
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
  • Anxious People - Fredrik Backman
  • Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
  • Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi
  • Before Your Memory Fades - Toshikazu Kawaguchi
  • Crooked Kingdom & Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo
  • Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa
  • Death’s End - Cixin Liu
  • Dreamcatcher - Stephen King
  • Endymion - Dan Simmons
  • Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
  • Five Point Someone - Chetan Bhagat
  • The Giver Quartet - Lois Lowry
  • Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
  • Hyperion - Dan Simmons
  • Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
  • No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai
  • Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Serious Men - Manu Joseph
  • Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
  • Tales from the Cafe - Toshikazu Kawaguchi
  • The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
  • The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu
  • The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons
  • The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
  • The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
  • The Girl Who Drank the Moon - Kelly Barnhill
  • The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
  • The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
  • The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
  • The Lord of the Rings series - J.R.R. Tolkien
  • The Martian - Andy Weir
  • The Midnight Library - Matt Haig
  • The Palace of Illusions - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
  • The Rise of Endymion - Dan Simmons
  • The Setting Sun - Osamu Dazai
  • The Shiva Trilogy - Amish Tripathi
  • The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Stranger - Albert Camus
  • The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
  • Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

Poetry

  • Ariel - Sylvia Plath
  • Gitanjali - Rabindranath Tagore
  • Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
  • Selected Poems - Pablo Neruda
  • The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot

Science, History & Ideas

  • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari
  • A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
  • Cosmos - Carl Sagan
  • Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • How the World Works - Noam Chomsky
  • How to Solve It - George Polya
  • Human Compatible - Stuart Russell
  • India 2020 - A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
  • Indian Summer - Alex von Tunzelmann
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
  • Skin in the Game - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard P. Feynman
  • The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
  • The Story of My Life - Helen Keller
  • The Theory of Everything - Stephen Hawking
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Philosophy

  • Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Freedom from the Known - Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl
  • Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
  • The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
  • The Republic - Plato
  • Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ - Friedrich Nietzsche

On Life & Work

  • 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B. Peterson
  • Atomic Habits - James Clear
  • Eat That Frog! - Brian Tracy
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
  • Ikigai - Hector Garcia & Francesc Miralles
  • Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert T. Kiyosaki
  • Surrounded by Idiots - Thomas Erikson
  • The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari - Robin S. Sharma
  • The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson
  • Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill
  • Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
  • Who Moved My Cheese? - Spencer Johnson
  • Who Will Cry When You Die? - Robin S. Sharma

Mystery & Thriller

  • A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder - Holly Jackson
  • And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
  • Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
  • As Good As Dead - Holly Jackson
  • Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
  • Good Girl, Bad Blood - Holly Jackson
  • Inferno - Dan Brown
  • In the Woods - Tana French
  • Malice - Keigo Higashino
  • Mexican Gothic - Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  • Misery - Stephen King
  • Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
  • Origin - Dan Brown
  • Pet Sematary - Stephen King
  • Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft
  • The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
  • The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
  • The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown
  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie
  • The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
  • The Secret History - Donna Tartt
  • The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton
  • The Shining - Stephen King
  • The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
  • The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides
  • Three Act Tragedy - Agatha Christie