These Be The Top Three

If I'm proud of something from the year gone by, one of the things is that I finally re-established my reading schedule. Towards the end of the year I averaged at about two books a month, and I hope to increase the count steadily. I read mostly mythology and non-fiction, while trying to make an attempt to read commentaries on current affairs and politics too. And these be the top three books:
1) GG: The first in the list has to be Goodman and Gilman's the Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics! After all I owe my degree to this book. This is something like the gospel truth of Pharmacology. Whether I read it or used it as a pillow at times, it certainly for me, is the book of the year! :)

2) Ajaya/Asura: Mythology has been an interest always, specially when the narration is not in the usual pattern. The last few years have seen a spurt in books based on the great classics of India. Amongst many of them that I've read so far, these versions of the Mahabharat and the Ramayan stand out. In both the books, the story is narrated form the side of the vanquished. They are the heroes, and the accepted heroes are the anti-heroes. One caution though, one has to read both these books with an open mind. And someone with a very traditional outlook may not like these at all!

3) Our Moon has Blood Clots: Racking my brains to think of which book made it to the top three of 2015, this particular one came into my mind. This is a brutally honest version told from the horses' mouth, on the horrific ethnic cleansing that shook the beautiful Kashmir valley from the late eighties. There is no melodrama infused in the book, just a straight narration that seems to flow effortlessly. And there's some humour too. A must-read for those interested in modern politics and history.

And yea, this be the book that always is a class apart: Any of the Potter books. I read Deathly Hallows again last year, soon after exams to tide over the post-exam crisis! :)

This year I hope to finish India After Gandhi (started it last August), Breaking India, and about fifteen other books that I bought whenever there was a book sale online, lying on the book shelf. Plus all those books including classics by Gurudev (Rabindranath Tagore) downloaded into the Kindle App on my iPad. So far I haven't been able to read the electronic version at all, as it simply doesn't feel the same as holding a book in the hand; hope to get over this mind-block too!

[This can also be found under #BooksIReadIn2015]

Comments

  1. The third book is my husband's fav... sigh... I have to get back on track on my reading habit... :-)
    Good luck with your 2016 reading list Piyu :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you Archana, good luck to you too, hope you read lots and lots of books this year :)

      Delete
  2. you will enjoy the book 'Anatomy of Illness' by Norman Cousins. He was the first editor of Lancet. And it's a 'size two' book.:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you Bhavani, will definitely read it! :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Would you like to share your thoughts?
https://www.piyukamath.com/2016/01/these-be-top-three.html
www.piyukamath.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-47
112040
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XI4RHF7TBM575DLAMGQM3QHZADHXUIA7
<urn:uuid:1005c586-6f5d-4cbd-8fa7-b9e915164232>
2018-11-19T05:12:45Z
172.217.5.243
text/html
sha1:2NC4RJSXKOM4MHCU5QOVLVAUDFE765BG
<urn:uuid:d15e285f-8667-4117-9b8a-39f74357300b>
https://www.piyukamath.com/2016/01/these-be-top-three.html
response
<urn:uuid:1fd80662-6ebb-4317-9424-77189f9b1cfe>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-47
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-171-47-161.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/