Three of my favourite books from 2024
These are great reads for cool people
A couple of days ago, I sat down with a group of tweens and teens to record a podcast titled “The Books You Read This Year.” I was reasonably confident that I’d hear all about the wonderful clones of Harry Potter and Geronimo Stilton they had devoured over the past year. My infinite wisdom about children’s reading habits stemmed from my observations at our local lending library. Each time my teen daughters and I walked in, I could be certain that 9 out of every 10 children browsing the shelves were looking for something in the fantasy or adventure genre.
How wrong I was, as I discovered during the podcast. History, it turns out, is now cool for teens. And mythology? Even cooler.
After the podcast recording ended, one of the kids messaged me, saying, “But Sangeetha aunty, you never told us which book you liked the most!” I was at a loss for an answer, mainly because I realized dementia had hit me early. I couldn’t recall the name of even one book I’d read in 2024. Had I not read any? Had I spent the entire year reading WhatsApp forwards and laughing at YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels? Had I truly degenerated into one of those phone-in-hand, nothing-in-the-head types? I spiralled from shock to denial to acceptance in less than a millisecond.
Just then, one of my daughters tapped me on the shoulder to ask why I’d forgotten to turn off the gas stove. She informed me that less than a quarter of the milk remained in the vessel, as the rest had kindly flowed down the hob stove. Like a gazelle stalked by a lion, I leapt out of my chair. The hob stove is mankind’s worst invention (tied closely with the reversing-car-annoying-loud-music). The hob stove is like a black hole, sucking every bit of liquid or semi-liquid in its vicinity and promptly refusing to turn back on. What follows is the hunt for a serviceman, and the stove only resurrects itself after a beauty sleep of over 48 hours—roughly the time it takes for said serviceman to arrive.
During those intervening 48 hours, I’d forgotten all about my book-related amnesia. Try cooking meals on 1.5 functioning stoves while juggling school and work schedules for the family! While I was still immersed in my hob stove fiasco, my housemaid informed me of a pile of books lying under a table at home. She politely warned me that if I didn’t move them, water from the nearby planter might seep into the pages. I could have hugged her (and nearly did!). That was the pile of books I had put away a few months earlier because it contained the ones I had so enjoyed reading in 2024 that I had earmarked them for re-reading in 2025. I was in good hands. My maid had inadvertently helped me self-diagnose that I had misplaced priorities in life (not amnesia).
Among the books I read in 2024, these three are my top favourites. I shall leave you with a few excerpts from each book and see if they pique your interest.
Book 1: Courage to be disliked
Authors: Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
I don’t usually read self-help books, but I picked up this one on the recommendation of a friend while we were hiking up a mountain together. The book is written in a dialogue format between a young man and a philosopher, who engage in a thought-provoking conversation over five nights.
It challenges many ‘truths’ we often take for granted. For instance, we might assume that a bad experience buying a bicycle would make us more cautious the next time—or even deter us from buying another bicycle altogether. However, the book argues that this is a myth. It suggests that we choose to convince ourselves that the initial experience was negative, and therefore, we avoid repeating it. The key idea is that it’s not the experience itself that matters, but how we choose to interpret it. Different people could perceive the same bicycle-buying experience in vastly different ways—some with a negative outlook, others with a positive one.
I’ve selected a few excerpts from the book to share with you. If you find them intriguing, this might just be a book worth exploring!
If you are disliked by someone, it is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom, and a sign that you are living in accordance with your own principles
A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others; it comes from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self.
If one really has a feeling of contribution, one will no longer have any need for recognition from others. Because one will already have the real awareness that “I am of use to someone,” without needing to go out of one’s way to be acknowledged by others. In other words, a person who is obsessed with the desire for recognition does not have any community feeling yet, and has not managed to engage in self-acceptance, confidence in others, or contribution to others.In the act of praise, there is the aspect of it being "the passing of judgment by a person of ability on a person of no ability.
If one is shining a bright spotlight on here and now, one cannot see the past or the future anymore.
We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
Book 2: Why we die
Author: Venki Ramakrishnan
This book was a gift from a friend. I never had much fondness for Chemistry in school—I blame my middle school Chemistry teacher entirely for this. She had a habit of dragging me out of class by my pigtails, all because she disliked the color of my hairband on any given day. Yes, we had teachers like that once upon a time.
Hoping to cure me of my aversion to Chemistry, my friend thought this book would be the perfect remedy. She picked up this well written book by a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry (2009) as a gift for me. However, my friend overlooked one minor detail—the book is more about biology and evolution than Chemistry. Despite this oversight, it has become one of my most cherished reads of 2024. My general distaste for Chemistry, alas, remains steadfast.
The book explores humanity's near-eternal quest for immortality. Though it delves deeply into biology, it’s written in such a simple and lucid style that even a primary schooler could grasp the science. As I read the book, two questions lingered in my mind:
Whether we like it or not, does death serve a necessary biological purpose?
With the rapid advancements in science, we undoubtedly have much to gain. But do we also have much to lose?
I’ve selected a few excerpts from the book to share with you. If these resonate with you, perhaps you might consider picking it up in 2025.
Larger animals tend to have longer lifespans than smaller animals. This is because small animals need to mature and reproduce quickly to increase their chances of raising offspring before they die.
Butterflies and insects live for days or weeks, while giant tortoises and some sharks and whales can live for several hundred years. You might think that this is because a biological program in each species specifies how long it can live, but this isn’t so. Rather, evolution mainly tries to optimize our fitness—the term biologists use for the likelihood an organism has to pass on its genes.
We try our best to bury that knowledge, but anxiety about death has driven human culture throughout history. Religions offer various explanations of what happens when we die, but all of them think of death as a transition to something else. We often can’t even bring ourselves to say that someone we know died, and instead, we use euphemisms like passed or departed.
Humans live almost twice as long as would be expected, given our weight. The same things that help us grow and survive when we are young cause us to age when we’re older. Scientists have found that many things that prevent cancer early in life are the causes of aging later, after our reproductive window has passed. Evolution doesn’t care what happens to us after we have passed on our genes.
Book 3: The Day I became a runner
Author: Sohini Chattopadhyay
2024 was the year I embraced running as my way to stay fit. It was also the year I decided to take hiking seriously, and what a year it has been! Not only did I improve my running endurance, but I also accomplished one major hiking milestone—I proudly scaled Mt. Kilimanjaro. Waking up early, lacing up my running shoes, and chasing the morning sun has become a cherished routine. Recognizing my growing passion, a friend thought I should learn more about running, particularly about women in India who’ve taken up the sport. She gifted me this book.
History books about post-1947 India often focus on grand narratives like Nehru’s socialism or about how India opened up to the world in 1991. This book offers a fresh perspective, tracing the evolution of Indian society from viewing women athletes as challengers to patriarchy in 1952 to gradually accepting women in sports by 2024.
The book tells this story through eight stories of Indian women runners. Some stories are deeply emotional, and I must confess that I often found myself in shock or anger. There are tales of superstar athletes, women my age, whose struggles I’d never heard of because mainstream news media did not choose to print these stories of state apathy.
As always, I leave you with some excerpts from the book. If they strike a chord, perhaps you’ll be inspired to explore it further.
For the last 10 years or so, I have been running three days a week around my apartment complex. I am middle-aged, slow and sulky, and my runs are not in preparation for a race. What I really love, despite the fact that I hate early morning interactions, is the response it produces in some of the older ladies in the building. There are two in particular, one stops her walk, leans on her stick and beams at me as I run past her. The other, raises both her hands, fists closed with the thumbs up, and pumps them as though she is cheering me past an invisible finish line. “Very good, very good,” she says.
Even today, even in a cosmopolitan, upper-middle class apartment society, a woman running is a bit of a strange sight. Imagine then, Mary D’Souza in 1952 in Bombay or Kamaljit Sandhu in 1968 in Chandigarh or even a young Usha running on the beach in Payyoli in 1980.
A girl running around like a boy,’ the neighbors used to say of Indian middle-distance runner Pinki Pramanik while she was growing up in the riverside village of Tilakdih in West Bengal. They felt that it was obscene. So, she would train herself at night instead, out of sight, running on the sandy shores of Subarnarekha. Pramanik won a silver medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, a gold at the Asian Games in Doha and three golds at the South Asian Games in Colombo that year.
After bagging the Gold medal in the 400 metres in the 1970 Asian Games at Bangkok, Kamaljit Sandhu’s career didn’t quite pan out the way she expected. After she took up coaching, she suggested to the Union Minister in charge of the 1982 Delhi Asiad ‘India can double our medal count if we focused on women athletes.’ The minister took her suggestion to heart, spurred the government to focus on women athletes, and voila! India did double the medal count in international events.
Our children’s magazine - Lighter Side’s ‘Bag of Tales - 2024’ is out!
If good stories make your heart happy and you love the feeling of curling up with a book, the smell of fresh paper in your hands, then you’re in for a treat! I’ve handpicked 12 amazing real-world stories and turned them into a delightful book. It’s our special end-of-year magazine for kids—a magazine that feels just like reading one of your favorite storybooks. The book has 12 real world stories that tell us that all news stories don’t have to be negative and scary. There is much positivity and good cheer to go around. After each story, I’ve curated an interesting activity that will be fun to do (puzzles, sketch work, games and more). Early birds - grab this book for INR 399/.
Grab your copy today! And if you know friends aged 7+ who adore reading, this makes the perfect gift to brighten their day. Let’s make storytime extra special this year! 🌟📚
