Books I read in 2020
Mar 8, 2020 | Read time: 3 min | 507 words
I did write out a separate post listing the books I read in 2019, but I was too lazy to fill in my thoughts about them, so that one is just a nice list of the books I read, minus my thoughts. Which is why, this year, I’m going to record what I thought about a book immediately after I read it. So here goes
Bill Carter - The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy
If you’re a frequent watcher of Leno/Letterman/Conan clips on YouTube, you’ll always come across some pretty bitter viewers who weigh in with their opinions on these hosts. What’s more, quite a few of them talk about how Leno screwed over Conan, and I wanted to know more about that. That was when I came across this. A well-written book, if there ever was one, about the whole affair. It gives you the entire sequence of events, from the very beginning - all that you need to know, and more.
Alex von Tunzelmann - Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
I quite liked this book. It has 3 central characters - Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Edwina Mountbatten.
So enthused were the spectators that they rushed forward, breaking down the police barriers. according to the Indian News Chronicle, ‘it was the dynamic personality of Pandit Nehru that restored order’ - the ‘dynamic personality’ being a standard journalistic euphemism for Jawahar landing a punch on a troublemaker.
Thomas Rathsack - Jaeger: At War With Denmark’s Elite Special Forces
Rathsack talks about joining and fighting the Jaeger Corps, Denmark’s special ops force, which has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
James Crabtree - The Billionaire Raj
The more I read, the more I like nuance. And this is an incredibly nuanced book describing India’s version of the Gilded Age. It has so many great observations about India, that it’s hard to list them all down. An especially good one is this, about India’s governing machine
Inside the machine, it was amateurism rather than authoritarianism that appeared to be the greater threat to India’s future.
How true! India’s governing structure can be amazingly efficient when it has to be, and amazingly inefficient when it doesn’t want to step up (or rather, inefficient because amateurs are in charge and don’t know how to step up).
Santosh Nair - Bulls, Bears and Other Beasts
Matthew McConaughey - Greenlights
Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake
Sebastian Maniscalco - Stay Hungry
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
TCA Ragahavan - The People Next Door
Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy
Probal Dasgupta - Watershed 1967
Bertil Lintner - China’s India War
Jim Mattis - Call Sign Chaos
Jerry Seinfeld - Is This Anything
This is a collection of Jerry Seinfeld’s routines, in print. A lot of the ones in the first half of the book will be familiar to you from his TV show, Seinfeld.