Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Siddhartha, in Sanskrit, symbolises one who has found the ultimate meaning. Herman Hesse's novel follows the journey of a bright young brahmin, Siddhartha, who is trying to find the truth. He has read the Vedic texts but is unable to understand the profound spiritual experiences it talks about. He realises that his teachers, and his…

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The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Trial by Franz Kafka is a novel that a friend suggested after I pestered him with questions about law and morality. I picked up this book a couple of weeks later to read it. It is a philosophical novel that follows the journey of a man called Joseph K, who has been arrested by…

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov is a beautiful book by Fyodor Dostoyevsky about three brothers. It follows their journey and the clash of their ideas. The appeal of this psychological novel is how the events affect each of the three brothers personally, moving them along in their spiritual journey. Some events shake their beliefs, sometimes they rattle…

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 3 by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

I have finally finished reading Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's life-defining series. Reading all three books is a big achievement, and I feel incredibly pleased. All in all, the series exceeded two thousand pages. If reading the entire series is such a big achievement, can you imagine how big the achievement of writing it would have been? The series attempts…

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

The Design of Everyday Things is a lovely book that changes the reader's perspective about the everyday things we use. It is widely considered the Bible of Design, and the author Don Norman is regarded as the father of design. The book is easy to read and looks at the most common tools from the…

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2

I read volume two of 'The Gulag Archipelago two years after reading volume one. I believe this series is the finest literature I have read until now, demonstrating the monumentality of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's work. The book felt like the personification of the term 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. It was an attempt to…

The Picturesque Poem

Hi Everyone, A few months ago, I thought of an idea for a new poetry page. I felt that I could merge pictures and poems aesthetically and that Instagram could be a great place to post them. So I tried my hand at Adobe Photoshop and created an Instagram page. I regularly post my poetry…

A Concise History of Australia by Stuart Macintyre

Before writing any thoughts about this book, I would like to give a disclaimer. I don't know much about Australian history and reading the book only made me aware of how much I didn't know and didn't understand. Nevertheless, having read the book, I have gained a feel of Australian culture and perspective. The book…

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

This is the first book I finished reading on my recently bought Amazon Kindle. It is a short sci-fi book written over a century ago, in 1898, which made it quite interesting because the imagination from back then would come from a different perspective. In fact, there have been recent movies created based on this…

Man and his Symbols

by Carl Jung, M.L von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffe I picked up this book impulsively, without much context about the field of psychology. I found it to be a fascinating read. It delved into topics I didn't know much about, and it changed how I viewed my own consciousness. The…