Nonfiction Reads: Politics, History, Queer, Feminism & More!

From the CH session conducted on 14th of June, we have curated a list of more than 130 nonfiction books for you to dive into.

To save you from doom scrolling, we have categorized the books into the following categories:

- By DBA Authors (Dalit, Bahujan & Adivasi)
- Queer Voices
- Feminist Prose
- Social Commentary & Politics
- In India’s Blood
- Historical Nonfiction
- Memoirs, Biographies & Autobiographies
- Artists & Art
- Science
- Travelogues & Travel Writing
- By Comedians & Humor In General
- Self Help & Love
- Audiobooks, Podcasts & Spoken Poetry
- Pandemic, Past & Present
- Philosophy
- Bonus! Fiction Reads

The list is quite long, so happy scrolling I guess!

By DBA Authors (Dalit, Bahujan & Adivasi)

1. Annihilation of Caste, B. R. Ambedkar
2. Who Were the Shudras, B. R. Ambedkar
3. Baluta, Dagdu Maruti Pawar
4. Gulamgiri, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule
5. A Forgotten Liberator, Savitribai Phule
6. Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture & Political Economy, Kancha Ilaiah
7. White as Milk and Rice: Stories of India’s Isolated Tribes, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia
8. Ants Among Elephants, Sujatha Gidla
9. Debrahmanising History, Braj Ranjan Mani
10. I Could Not Be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS, Bhanwar Meghwanshi

Queer Voices

1. Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Indian Workplace, Parmesh Shahani
2. Unarvum Uruvamum (Our Lives, Our Words), A. Revathi
3. Brave Face, Shaun David Hutchinson
4. All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto, George M. Johnson
5. The Deviant’s War, Eric Cervini
6. A Dutiful Boy: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance, Mohsin Zaidi

Feminist Prose

1. Hunger — A Memoir Of My Body, Roxane Gay
2. Difficult Women, Roxane Gay
3. Bad Feminist: Essays, Roxane Gay
4. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
5. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
6. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado-Perez
7. Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, Christina Lamb
8. No Nation for Women: Reportage on Rape from India, the World’s Largest Democracy, Priyanka Dubey
9. Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin
10. Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, Anuradha Ghandy

Social Commentary & Politics

1. Gods and Godmen of India, Khushwant Singh
2. Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why, Jude Ellison Sady Doyle
3. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human‑Centered Planet, John Green
4. My Seditious Heart, Arundhati Roy
5. The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy
6. The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen
7. Feel Free, Zadie Smith
8. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson
9. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
10. Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People, Benjamin Crump
11. The Library Book, Susan Orlean
12. The Virtual Hindu Rashtra: Saffron Nationalism and New Media, Rohit Chopra
13. Why I Am An Atheist, Bhagat Singh
14. Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India, Madhavi Menon
15. No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism, Vijay Prashad
16. The Burden of Democracy, Pratap Bhanu Mehta
17. The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, S. Jaishankar
18. The Greater Common Good, Arundhati Roy
19. A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, Rohit De

In India’s Blood

1. The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, Manu S. Pillai
2. Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji, Manu S. Pillai
3. The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History, Manu S. Pillai
4. Our Moon Has Blood Clots, Rahul Pandita
5. Curfewed Night, Basharat Peer
6. Gujarat Files, Rana Ayyub
7. Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre, Harsh Mander
8. Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India, Harsh Mander

Historical Nonfiction

1. India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy, Madhav Khosla
2. India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945, Srinath Raghavan
3. War and Peace in Modern India, Srinath Raghavan
4. The Good Friday Agreement, Siobhan Fenton
5. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe
6. The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War, Rohini Mohan
7. Shigeru Mizuki’s Hitler, Shigeru Mizuki
8. India’s Struggle for Independence, Bipin Chandra
9. 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, David Stevenson
10. The Great Repression: The Story of Sedition in India, Chitranshul Sinha
11. India After Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha
12. Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire, Prashant Kidambi
13. A Corner of a Foreign Field, Ramachandra Guha
14. The Cambridge History of India, E. J. Rapson
15. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler

Memoirs, Biographies & Autobiographies

1. The Diary Of A Young Girl, Anne Frank
2. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
3. The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, Naoki Higashida
4. The Lonely City, Olivia Laing
5. The Last Girl, Jenna Krajeski & Nadia Murad
6. Scrappy Little Nobody, Anna Kendrick
7. The Words, Jean-Paul Sartre
8. Into The Wild, Jon Krakauer
9. Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, Stefan Zweig
10. Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson
11. Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
12. Rafa, John Carlin & Rafael Nadal
13. Beyond The Lines: An Autobiography, Kuldeep Nayyar
14. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
15. Reasons to Stay Alive, Matt Haig

Artists & Art

1. Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings, Josh Larsen
2. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath
3. So Bright and Delicate: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, Penguin Classics
4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
5. The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, Peter Hessler
6. Adhuri Cheezon Ka Devta, Geet Chaturvedi

Science

1. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
2. Cosmos, Carl Sagan
3. Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
4. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
5. Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari
6. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari
7. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, Carl Zimmer
8. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
9. The Last Lecture, Jeffrey Zaslow & Randy Pausch
10. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, David Christian
11. The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang

Travelogues & Travel Writing

1. City of Djinns, William Dalrymple
2. Red Dust: A Path Through China, Ma Jian
3. Truck de India!: A Hitchhiker’s guide to Hindustan, Rajat Ubhaykar
4. Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands, Aatish Taseer
5. India Moving: A History of Migration, Chinmay Tumbe

By Comedians & Humor In General

1. I’m Not a Terrorist, But I’ve Played One On TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man, Maz Jobrani
2. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This — A History and Philosophy of Jokes, Jim Holt
3. Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher & Joshua Ravetch
4. Born a Crime, Trevor Noah
5. Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid, Simon Pegg
6. Yes Please, Amy Poehler
7. Bossypants, Tina Fey
8. Dear Girls, Ali Wong

Self Help & Love

1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain
2. Sorry I’m Late I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously, Jessica Pan
3. Let’s Talk Money: You’ve Worked Hard for It, Now Make It Work for You, Monika Halan
4. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed
5. Good Vibes, Good Life: How Self-Love Is the Key to Unlocking Your Greatness, Vex King
6. Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
7. The 5 AM Club, Robin Sharma

Audiobooks, Podcasts & Spoken Poetry

1. The Seen and The Unseen, Amit Varma (Podcast)
2. Who They Was, Gabriel Krauze (Audiobook)
3. The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, Garrett Graff (Audiobook)
4. Trans/Generation, Alok Vaid-Menon (Spoken Poetry)

Pandemic, Past & Present

1. Intimations, Zadie Smith
2. Notes On Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3. Age Of Pandemics (1817–1920): How They Shaped India and the World, Chinmay Tumbe

Philosophy

1. I Think, Therefore I Am: All the Philosophy You Need to Know, Lesley Levene
2. Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dr. Dan Ariely
3. The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
4. Humiliation, Wayne Koestenbaum

Bonus! Fiction Reads

1. The Carpet Weaver, Nemat Sadat
2. Contemporary Indian Short Stories (Book Series), Sahitya Akademi

For more such sessions about authors, book recommendations, or literature at large, join our club on CH: clubhouse.com/club/books-with-scrandages

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