26 April 2016

World Book Day : 101 Books You Must Read - A Short Reading List

April 23, 2016

What is amongst the better ways to mark the ‘World Book Day’? Going through a list of 101 must-read books (tailored for Indian readers) doesn’t seem like a bad idea

Harsh Gupta was apparently partly inspired and partly exasperated with my reading lists; more importantly, he did not find them to be of much use to him or most people outside the “nerd bubble” or ivory tower. He has therefore taken the liberty to create his own list (with a little input from me), which is supposed to be more relevant to the homo discens dextera indicus politicus in a globalised world. So here are our 101 suggestions! 
The Mahabharata – Vyaasa 

Understanding Poverty – Banerjee, Mookherjee, Benabou 
A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar – KA Nilakanta Sastri 

The Deniers – Lawrence Solomon 

A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers – VS Ramachandran 

Nudge – Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein 

India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy – Ramachandra Guha 
Minimum Wages – David Neumark 

India Unbound – Gurcharan Das 

On Human Nature – EO Wilson 

Forgotten Continent – Michael Reid 

The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives, 1935-1947 – CH Philips, MD Wainwright 

Rethinking the welfare state – Ronald Daniels 

The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707 – Irfan Habib 

Development as Freedom – Amartya Sen 

Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 – Janet Abu-Lughod 

The Fallacy of Campaign Reform 

The Law – Frederic Bastiat 

The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (9 volumes) 

My Country, My Life – LK Advani 

Indian Summer – Alex Von Tunzelmann 

Losing Ground – Charles Murray 

The Welfare State we are in – James Bartholomew 

On Liberty – Mill 

Liberal Fascism – Jonah Goldberg 

The Venture of Islam (3 vols) – Marshall Hodgson 

Imagining India – Nandan Nilekani 

Common Sense – Thomas Paine 

What Evolution Is – Ernst Mayr 

Taxing Ourselves – Slamrod, Bakija 

Global Tax Revolution – Edwards, Mitchell 

The Best-Laid Plans – O’ Toole 

China’s Deep Reform – Dittmer, Liu 

The Antitrust Religion – Edwin Rockefeller 

Water for Sale – Frederik Segerfeldt 

More Guns, Less Crime – Lott 

The Blank Slate – Stephen Pinker 

School Choice: The Findings 

The Mystery of Capital – Hernando de Soto 

The Evolution of Cooperation – Robert Axelrod 

Eminent Historians – Shourie 

The Road to Serfdom – Hayek 

There is No Alternative – Claire Berlinski 

The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 – Niall Ferguson 

Anarchy, State and Utopia – Robert Nozick 

India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal – Ashley Tellis 

Political Liberalism – John Rawls 

The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith 

Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species – Sarah Blaffer Hardy 

Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan – Akbar 

Complete Works of Aristotle – Jonathan Barnes 

Engaging India – Strobe Talbott 

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics – Mearsheimer 

Black Rednecks and White Liberals – Sowell 

India’s China War – Neville Maxwell 

Life at the Bottom – Theodore Dalrymple 

The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge Neuronal Man – Jean-Pierre Changeaux 

In Defense of Globalization – Bhagwati 

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft 

Democracy in America – Alex Tocqueville 

Two Treatises of Government – Locke 

Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse – Partha Chatterjee 

The Open Society and its Enemies (2 volumes) – Popper 

The Ethical Brain – Michael Gazzaniga 

The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins 

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1500-2000 – Paul Kennedy 

India’s Political Economy 1947-2004: The Gradual Revolution – Francine Frankel 

Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations – Francis Gavin 

India and the United States: Estranged Democracies 1941–1991 – Dennis Kux 

Capitalism and Freedom – Milton Friedman 

Decolonizing the Hindu Mind – Koenraad Elst 

State-directed Development – Kohli 

The Politics of India since Independence – Paul Brass 

Indian Philosophy (2 vols) – S. Radhakrishnan 

Islamic Humanism – Lenn Goodman 

Economics in One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt 

Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime – Veena Talwar Oldenburg 
Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy – Bharat Karnad 

Alberuni’s India – Al-Biruni 

Brothers Against The Raj – Leonard Gordon 

Pakistan: A Hard Country – Anatol Lieven 

The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (5 vols) – Jaroslav Pelikan 

India’s Israel Policy – PR Kumaraswamy 

Nationalism – Craig Calhoun 

The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha – Michael Coogan 

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750– Jonathan Israel 

Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 – Jonathan Israel 

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 – Jonathan Israel 

In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth – JP Mallory 

India: A Million Mutinies Now – VS Naipaul 

Education and Capitalism – Walberg 

History of Dharmasastra – PV Kane 

Descartes’ Error – Antonio Damasio 

In Service of Emergent India – Jaswant Singh 

The Language Instinct – Stephen Pinker 

War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years – Srinath Raghavan 

Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong– Marc Hauser 

Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir – Mridu Rai 

The Economic History of India, 1857-1947 – Tirthankar Roy 

The Improving State of the World – Goklany 

The Road to Monetary Union in Europe: The Emperor, the Kings, and the Genies – Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa 

First published in 2012 at Centre Right India.

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