Nikhil Samuel

• Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
  Most of what we worry about never happens
• Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
  Thinking about death helps you live better. Also he wrote about everything from thumbs to cannibals
• J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
  The observer is the observed. Still trying to fully understand this one
• Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
  Ancient philosophy for modern problems like unpopularity and heartbreak
• Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
  Chasing certainty is what makes you anxious

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Incerto
  Things that get stronger from chaos. The opposite of fragile isn't robust
• Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything
  Bottom-up beats top-down. Most things evolve, they're not designed
• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
  We believe in shared fictions like money, nations, corporations. That's our superpower
• Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain
  We're status-seeking machines pretending to be altruistic. Even charity is signaling
• Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo, Poor Economics
  Small details tested through experiments beat big theories about poverty
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
  Geography gave some civilizations wheat and horses, others didn't get lucky
• Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
  51 billion tons to zero. Practical breakdown of what we need to invent
• Peter Bevelin, Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
  Learn how your brain tricks you, then build systems to compensate
• Joseph Jordania, Why Do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution
  Singing together put early humans in a trance state to fight predators
• Nivedita Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist
  Power is everywhere once you learn to see it. Even "woman" isn't obvious

• Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi
  How India stayed democratic when nobody thought it would. Messy but it worked
• Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: A Biography
  Power and loneliness. Written by someone who actually knew her
• Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne
  Kerala's queens actually ruled. Matrilineal system created different power dynamics
• Manu S. Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
  Hinduism was reshaped by fighting Christianity. Borrowed their playbook
• Tony Joseph, Early Indians
  DNA shows everyone migrated to India. No original inhabitants
• Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian
  Arguing is very Indian. From Buddhism onwards, dissent was normal
• Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants
  Untouchability through a Dalit family's story. Even communists kept caste hierarchy

Memoirs

• Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer
  People talking about the invisible enemy. Hard to read
• Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
  Fragments about existence by Pessoa's accountant alter-ego. You are many selves
• Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales
  17 years in the Gulag. Cold and hunger destroy you completely
• Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
  A bus accident shows how occupation actually works. Permits, checkpoints, bureaucracy

Fiction

• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
  Hospital as Soviet microcosm. What did the system cost and was it worth it
• Dante Alighieri, Inferno
  Punishments mirror the crime. Nine circles of hell
• Jack London, Martin Eden
  Working class guy educates himself, becomes successful writer, realizes it's empty
• António Lobo Antunes, Various works
  Portugal's colonial war in Africa. Stream of consciousness, time jumps everywhere
• James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
  Black church in Harlem. Religion as both cage and freedom

Sci-Fi

• Frank Herbert, Dune
• Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
• Isaac Asimov, Foundation

• René Girard - Mimetic theory, scapegoat mechanism
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Übermensch, will to power, eternal recurrence
• C.G. Jung - Collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation
• J. Krishnamurti - Choiceless awareness, psychological revolution