Dear Readers,

Winter is here with a beautiful bleakness about the bare trees everywhere. Here in Manali, the first snow has fallen and rumours of more snow swirl about. All in all the perfect time to snuggle into bed with a book!

What’s your reading this year been like ? In your end-of-the-year reading audit, would you like to change anything ?

Read more and read a mix ? Read a young adult novel to discover the pulse of what’s popular with younger readers? An economist's memoir, fiction on climate change, geopolitics ?

Here are our 2021 favourites, so you can construct your own TBR (To be Read) list.

You could note these in your Good Reads account To Read Bookshelf, make a wish list on your Amazon account, type the titles into Evernote. Or better still you could subscribe to our book box, so you receive a different book every month delivered directly to your doorstep.

Best Psychology Book

How to choose the right partner, how to work well in teams, why you should try therapy.. fascinating perspectives on all these matters in Alain de Botton’s luminous prose. We first encountered de Botton in the fabulous The Architecture of Happiness and have been fans ever since. Highly recommend all his books and The School of Life too !

Best Economics Book

Charlie Munger famously said that reading a biography of a great man helps the reader understand his theories. Certainly this is so in the case of Economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Its wondrous to follow Sen across three continents, and to watch his philosophy, economics and ideology evolve. Home in the World is long read, but well worth your time.

Best Young Adult (YA) Book

Cinderella is sooty from the grease of fixing robots in this retelling of the classic fairy tale ; she doesn’t sweep the fireplace, instead she is put to work as a mechanic by her stepmother. Marissa Meyer constructs a fascinating and entirely credible world, even as she keeps the romance of the old fairy tale alive. The first of the Lunar Chronicles, Cinder was published in 2012, we only got to it this year.

Best Business Book

Countless conversations, arguments and newspaper headlines have been triggered by this remarkable memoir. Where Sheryl Sandberg asks women to Lean In, Indra Nooyi calls upon governments and the corporate world to look at issues like childcare that hold women back. My Life in Full is best read between the lines ; no fulminations but it’s all here - race and gender stereotyping, salary parity between men and women, the design of a corporate structure that is weighted against half the human population.

Best Chick Lit

If you don’t know what ‘ghosting’ means you MUST read this book. And if you do know what it means, read it too ! Finding love is always fun, throw in a dating app, deadly dialogue, Brit humour and you have this delightfully zippy read. Ghosts is also great as an audiobook.

Best Food Memoir

In a global world of immigrants, food can be a powerful way of discovering your identity. For all K drama fans, for all food fans, Crying in H Mart is a poignant book about food, belonging and mother love.

Best Sci-fi

A fabulous story set around physics, politics, climate change and outer space! If we had read this book in high school, chances are we would all have been scientists. Project Hail Mary is thought provoking, it’s fascinating and it changes the way you see the galaxy. It takes a while to warm up, but please please do persist, you won’t regret it!

Best Philosophy book

Soak in philosophy as Weiner revisits the great Western philosophers from the Greeks to Waldeau in The Socrates Express. Weiner writes beautifully, his narrative compelling, his prose irresistible.

Best Country Books : China and Afghanistan

Read India’s China Challenge for insights into India’s most powerful neighbour. Author and journalist, Ananth Krishnan has been based in China for years and his book is an intelligent mix of reportage, analysis and stories of everyday people. We preferred it to Age of Ambition by New Yorker writer Evan Osnos, but of course if you are on a China binge do read that as well. Also Wild Swans and Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress.

There has been an outpouring of writing set in this hot spot in the last few years. But if you had to pick just one book, No Good Men Among the Living is the one ! Journalist Anand Gopal follows a Taliban leader, an Allied commander and a civilian housewife to give us a mesmerising picture of this war torn country. And here is the fascinating backstory of this book.

Best Picture Book

Biologist and illustrator Sabina Radeva gives us a wonderful version of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It’s so gorgeous that really, it should be required reading for everybody.

Lots more fabulous reading from 2021 coming up in Part 2 , a fortnight from today.

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And in the meantime, if you’d like to revamp your reading life or gift a friend or family a very special New Year present , why not try out a book box ?

Till next fortnight then, Happy Reading !

Warm regards,

Sonya

Sonya’s Read to Lead

What Should I Read Next : Issue 10