Readers on the books they love, and why.
Quote of the day
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
On Animal Farm · by rakib_mahmud · 30 Oct 2026
It's about a hundred pages long and it looks like a children's book. We read it in school and I thought it was just about Russia. It's the horse, Boxer, that gets to you. He works harder and harder an…
Read the full postOn The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo · by imran_sarker · 29 Oct 2026
Stick with it. The start is a lot of Swedish financial journalism and I almost returned it. Then Lisbeth Salander properly enters the story, an old man hires someone to solve a forty-year-old disappea…
Read the full postOn Wuthering Heights · by farhana.akter · 27 Oct 2026
Everybody in this book is horrible to everybody else, for two generations, on a very windy hill. Heathcliff hangs a dog. I don't understand how this ended up on lists of great romances. And yet I love…
Read the full postOn Brick Lane · by anika.sultana · 26 Oct 2026
A girl from a village in Bangladesh gets married off to an older man in London and watches the world from a council flat. My aunt lived something very close to this in Tower Hamlets, and she was the o…
Read the full postOn Gone Girl · by imran_sarker · 25 Oct 2026
I won't say what happens at the halfway point. If somebody has already told you, I'm sorry, and you should still read it for how she pulls it off. Neither of these two people is likeable, and that's w…
Read the full postOn Jane Eyre · by farhana.akter · 23 Oct 2026
I'd filed this under gothic romance. Then I read the first chapters again, with the red room and the awful school, and this child is furious. She talks back. She insists she matters, at a time when no…
Read the full postOn The Alchemist · by anika.sultana · 22 Oct 2026
This one divides people, and I get why. It's very simple and it keeps telling you what the lesson is. On a bad day it reads like a greeting card. But I read it when I was nineteen and scared about cha…
Read the full postOn The Complete Adventures of Feluda · by mebmrauf · 21 Oct 2026
Yes, the man who made Pather Panchali also wrote some of the most enjoyable detective stories for young readers in Bengali. Feluda is calm and sharp, his young cousin Topshe tells the stories, and Jat…
Read the full postOn Atomic Habits · by zubair_ahmed · 20 Oct 2026
I'm usually allergic to self-help. Half of these books are one blog post stretched to 300 pages, and to be fair this one repeats itself too. What worked for me was one small idea: make the bad habit h…
Read the full postOn Charlotte's Web · by maliha.karim · 18 Oct 2026
I bought this to give to my niece and then read it myself on the rickshaw home. Bad idea. I was crying over a spider on Mirpur Road. It is such a calm little book. It never talks down to children abou…
Read the full postOn Cosmos · by mebmrauf · 17 Oct 2026
Some of the science has moved on since 1980, but that's not why you read it. You read it for Sagan's way of making you care. He tells you how Eratosthenes worked out the size of the Earth using shadow…
Read the full postOn Frankenstein · by emily.carter · 16 Oct 2026
No bolts in the neck, no lightning scene, and the creature isn't a grunting monster. He teaches himself to read by spying on a family through a crack in the wall, and then he makes a better argument t…
Read the full postOn Designing Data-Intensive Applications · by mebmrauf · 14 Oct 2026
Most books about databases teach you one tool. This one explains why the tools are built the way they are, and what you give up with each choice. Replication, partitioning, transactions and what "cons…
Read the full postOn The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · by daniel_brooks · 13 Oct 2026
There's barely a plot. The Earth gets demolished on page thirty or so to make way for a space bypass, and things get less serious after that. Every couple of pages there's a joke you want to read out…
Read the full postOn The Kite Runner · by sadia.islam · 12 Oct 2026
Don't read this at work on your lunch break. That's my only advice. I know some people find the second half too neat, and I understand that. Coincidences pile up. But the first half, the two boys and…
Read the full postOn The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe · by maliha.karim · 11 Oct 2026
It's about 200 pages and I finished it in one sitting with a cup of tea. I remembered the snow and the lamp post and the Turkish delight, which as a kid I imagined as the most amazing food in existenc…
Read the full postOn A Golden Age · by sadia.islam · 9 Oct 2026
It's set in Dhaka in 1971, and it follows a widow who just wants to keep her two children near her while the war comes closer. I'd heard the stories from my own family my whole life, but mostly as dat…
Read the full postOn One Hundred Years of Solitude · by emily.carter · 8 Oct 2026
Yes, nearly everyone is called Aureliano or José Arcadio. Yes, there's a family tree printed at the front, and yes, you will use it. I kept a bookmark there. Once I stopped trying to keep track of eve…
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