Compared to the last couple of years, I read fewer books in 2025, but I think the variety was higher. That probably explains the highest number of fiction books in a long time.
And so, once again, like 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 , and 2024, presenting #Bibliofiles 2025’s list of ten (plus the long list). From the 58 books I read this year…
(more…)Neha Dixit
‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’ is the kind of book that forces one to look at one’s privilege at an individual level, and holds a mirror to all of us at a societal level. Neha Dixit has researched this book for nine years, and the breadth and depth of her 900+ interactions, and her thinking, is evident in the structure and narrative of the book.
It is, as the cliche goes, the voice of the voiceless – the people whose desperate toils to survive we deliberately look away from or pretend not to see, because it is a reality we will find difficult to face if we consider ourselves human. I call it sub-human because, from our gated vantage point, in a nation whose GDP chest-thumping and gleaming malls and fancy consumer goods belies the struggle of the large majority of its population, people like Syeda exist in conditions that are perilous in terms of income, health, and safety. A poor, Muslim, woman.
(more…)Benjamín Labatut (translated by Adrian Nathan West)
When we cease to understand the world is one of the most unique books I’ve read in a while. Though it can broadly be classified as historical fiction, that would fail to capture the essence of the book, because the subject is science, mathematics and the deep mysteries underlying reality. Almost philosophy.
Featuring real historic figures and events, it could even be non-fiction as it explores the lives and discoveries of scientists and mathematicians who changed the way we understood the world. More interestingly, it also puts focus on the moral consequences of their work, the effect it had on themselves, and the impact it had on the world. Apparently, the scientists and their discoveries are all factual, the personal lives include some fiction.
(more…)Will Storr
The Status Game had been on the list for a long while before I managed to get to it. Though there were a few perspectives that I had already read about in other books, most notably Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World, and to some extent Wanting by Luke Bergis, I found the overall narrative compelling and insightful.
In The Status Game, Will Storr explores the deep-rooted human drive for status, which has existed since our hunter-gatherer days, and makes a case for how it is one of the fundamental motivators of human behaviour, and how status-seeking influences everything from our personal health, happiness and identities to cultural and societal structures.
(more…)Sara Imari Walker
A lot of the books I have read in the recent past have to do with trying to get a working definition of life and/or consciousness. I picked up ‘Life as No One Knows It’ to get more perspectives in that direction, but it gave me something else by shifting the frame. At exactly halfway through the book, there is a line that goes “what will really be alien are examples of life (biological or technological) that have traversed a completely different evolutionary trajectory than we have.” And that’s important because if we keep looking for markers based on life on earth, we may not find it anywhere else in the universe. It’s thus important to find a framework that is agnostic of life as we know it, so that we have a measurable way of recognising and classifying signs of life/intelligence when we come across it.
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