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My Favourite Books of All-Time
Here are the best books I have ever read –
Bhagavad Gita
by Eknath Easwaran
Easwaran’s commentaries on the Gita’s teachings make it clear why this sacred text is a manual for living a spiritual life. Although the battlefield is a perfect backdrop, for Easwaran the Gita’s subject is the “war within,” the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage.
Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor Frankl
A chronicle by Frankl of his experiences as a German Nazi concentration camp inmate during World War II, this is one of the most life-changing books I have ever read.
Who Moved My Cheese
by Spencer Johnson
The book illustrates the simple fact that change will happen, whether we choose to accept it or not. The defining factor is how we deal with it; whether we allow ourselves to change or insist on staying the same.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
by Richard Bach
Read this tiny book if you feel you have reached a ceiling or barrier in your personal life, or if you wish to make some needed changes in your life, or if you are wanting to follow your gut instinct but are too afraid, or if you feel that there is something more to life than what you are being told.
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
Meditations has never brought me easy answers, just more questions, and self-introspection about how I am living. Marcus advises that there is a larger meaning to events and lives that escapes us. This knowledge itself is a comfort.
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
by Dale Carnegie
We often worry because we carry the burden of both the past and the future with us today. That makes the present look much more difficult than it really is. Carnegie advises us to focus just on today. And I just love this advice. A classic book that must be read once every year.
Autobiography of A Yogi
by Paramahansa Yogananda
This book explains the subtle but definite laws behind both the ordinary events of our everyday life and the extraordinary events we commonly term as ‘miracles’. With soul-satisfying consciousness and wit, Yogananda dispels the secrets of life and the world opening our hearts and minds to the happiness and limitless spiritual capacities that last in the lives of every human being.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack
by Peter Kaufman
A collection of Charlie Munger’s insights and speeches, it is a book on how to live a happy, sensible and rich life and in the process become a better thinker and investor. If you haven’t read this book, to twist one of Munger’s sayings, you are living the life of a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
Fooled by Randomness
by Nassim Taleb
The central idea of this masterpiece from Taleb is that the world we live in is more random than we would like to think. A human mind is a meaning-making machine. Through millions of years of evolution, nature has hardwired the human brain to seek patterns and consistencies everywhere. But as civilization has progressed the world around us has become increasingly uncertain and unpredictable.
The Intelligent Investor
by Benjamin Graham
This book is based on a fundamental set of investment principles that Graham believed to be true in 1949, and which remain true even 7+ decades after the book was first published. These principles are something that, no matter what the circumstances, are never to be broken. It is a book that helps build the character of an intelligent investor. You may be disappointed if you read the book with any other expectation.
All I Want To Know Is Where I’m Going To Die So I’ll Never Go There
by Peter Bevelin
This book contains a brilliant story of a fictitious Seeker, who has known a lot of misery, and his visit to the “Library of Wisdom” where he meets another fictitious character – the Librarian – along with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. It is structured as conversations full of quotations from Buffett and Munger. These conversations cover not just business and investing, but also decision making in general, life, and parenting.
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
by Peter Bevelin
This is one of the most impactful books I have come across and is for those who love the constant search for knowledge. It is in the spirit of Charlie Munger, who says, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” It is a compendium of ideas from biology, psychology, statistics, physics, economics, and human behavior.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
by Robert Cialdini
This is a classic book on influence and persuasion in which Cialdini explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles ethically in business and everyday situations. You learn the six universal principles of influence and how to use them to become a skilled persuader — and, just as importantly, how to defend yourself against dishonest influence attempts.
Tuesdays with Morrie
by Mitch Albom
This is a beautiful book, also a sad one. It makes you cry at several moments, and even if it doesn’t bring you to tears, it is certainly a book that will leave you in a melancholic mood. It depicts a pure, warm relationship between a student and a teacher. Mitch rediscovers Morrie in the last months of the old man’s life. Their rekindled relationship turns into one final ‘class’ – in how to live.
Calvin & Hobbes
by Bill Watterson
Calvin & Hobbes is undoubtedly a part of most people’s childhood. One might misconstrue it to be just a cartoon, but there is certainly a lot more to it. The cartoon consists of layers of symbolism, picked up from the nitty-gritty of the mundane life. It even has some precious insights into existentialism and life. Nothing like a child with an imaginary tiger to gain some new perspective, right?