Readers on the books they love, and why.
On A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
I think this is better than The Kite Runner, and I know that's not the popular view. It's two women in Kabul across thirty years, stuck in the same house and first hating each other. It is very sad. T…
Read the full postBy sadia.islam · 14 Sep 2026
On War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
There are four of us. We agreed on thirty pages a week, which comes out to about a year. I was sure we'd give up by Christmas. We didn't, mostly because it's so much easier to read than its reputation…
Read the full postBy daniel_brooks · 12 Sep 2026
On The Martian by Andy Weir
I failed a chemistry test in class nine, and here I am at midnight, excited about a man making water out of rocket fuel. The writing isn't fancy. The characters back on Earth are thin. None of that ma…
Read the full postBy tanvir_hossain · 11 Sep 2026
On The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
I'd only read parts of it in school and I remembered it as solemn. It isn't. She's sharp and vain and complains about her mother and has crushes and rewrites the same entries because she wants to be a…
Read the full postBy farhana.akter · 10 Sep 2026
On Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Don't read the back cover and don't let anyone tell you about it. A man wakes up on a spaceship with no memory. That's all you should know. I liked it even more than The Martian, because there's real…
Read the full postBy tanvir_hossain · 9 Sep 2026
On The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Fair warning: this book ruins doors for you. Once you learn why you keep pushing a door that should be pulled, you start seeing it everywhere, along with confusing taps, stove knobs and light switches…
Read the full postBy mebmrauf · 7 Sep 2026
On Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling
I went back to it during a very stressful month at work because I wanted something I already knew. What I hadn't noticed as a kid is how funny the first few chapters are. The Dursleys are a great piec…
Read the full postBy maliha.karim · 6 Sep 2026
On Deep Work by Cal Newport
It's mostly one idea: focused work without interruption is getting rarer and more valuable, so protect it. There's a fair amount of padding and a lot of examples of professors who can ignore their ema…
Read the full postBy zubair_ahmed · 5 Sep 2026
On And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
I read a lot of mysteries and I'm annoyingly proud of solving them early. Not this one. I had three different theories and all three people died. Ten strangers on an island and a poem that tells you h…
Read the full postBy imran_sarker · 4 Sep 2026
On Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
You can write software for years without really knowing what happens underneath. This book fixes that, slowly and kindly. It starts with two kids signalling with flashlights, moves on to Morse code an…
Read the full postBy mebmrauf · 2 Sep 2026
On Foundation by Isaac Asimov
If you want space battles, you've picked up the wrong book. Nearly every problem here gets solved by people sitting in rooms and being clever at each other. A mathematician predicts the fall of an emp…
Read the full postBy tanvir_hossain · 1 Sep 2026
On The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
It's written as a set of letters from a driver turned businessman to the Chinese premier, explaining how he got rich. He tells you early that he killed his employer. And you kind of like him, which is…
Read the full postBy rakib_mahmud · 30 Aug 2026
On Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Born at the stroke of midnight when India became independent, the narrator has his life tied to the country's, and he tells you all of it, loudly, with digressions inside his digressions. I gave up ar…
Read the full postBy priya.das · 29 Aug 2026
On The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
The tools it mentions have changed, and the newer edition helps with that. But the actual advice, like don't repeat yourself and learn your editor and take responsibility for your work, is exactly wha…
Read the full postBy daniel_brooks · 28 Aug 2026
On The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I think most people get given this as children and then forget about it. Go back to it. The grown-ups on all those tiny planets, the businessman counting stars he owns and the king ruling nobody, are…
Read the full postBy mebmrauf · 27 Aug 2026
On The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
A boy grows up in America with a name he hates, chosen for a reason he doesn't learn till much later. That's the whole story, really, and Lahiri tells it so quietly that you don't notice how much it's…
Read the full postBy priya.das · 25 Aug 2026
On Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Short stories get overlooked, so here's my pitch. Each one here takes half an hour and leaves you thinking for a day. In the first, a couple start telling each other secrets in the dark during a power…
Read the full postBy sadia.islam · 24 Aug 2026
On Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
I enjoyed this a lot, but I'd be careful about treating it as the final word. Harari makes big confident claims, and specialists have pushed back on several of them. Read it the way you'd listen to a…
Read the full postBy arif_chowdhury · 23 Aug 2026