I read extensively but slowly. Here's some of the books I've read and can heartily recommend. You are welcome to discuss any of these books with me.

---

• Seeing by Jose Saramago
• Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson
• The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life by Avinash Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff
• The Indian Clerk: A Novel by David Leavitt
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• Random Walks and Electrical Networks by Peter Doyle
• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
• The Yiddish Policemen's Story by Michael Chabon
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman
• Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur Herman
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
• The End of Food by Paul Roberts
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank
• My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman
• The Complete Yes Minister: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister edited by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay
• The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy
• Symmetry by Marcus du Sautoy
• The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
• The Age of Shiva: A Novel by Manil Suri
• The World is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the 21st Century by Thomas L. Friedman
• A Certain Ambiguity by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal
• All About Derivatives by Michael Durbin
• The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
• Turing (A Novel about Computation) by Christos H. Papadimitriou
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
• The Inverted World by Christopher Priest
• Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Gowers (incidentally, Gowers is a Fields Medallist)
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers by Benjamin Yandell
• The Essential John Nash by John Nash, Harold Kuhn (editor), and Sylvia Nasar (editor)
• A Beautiful Math by Tom Siegfried
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• Symmetry and the Monster by Mark Ronan
• The Equation That Couldn't be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry by Mario Livio
• Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability by Peter Pesic
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
• The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell by Basil Mahon
• Stallion of the Sun by U.R. Anantha Murthy
• Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein
• The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright by Tom Crouch
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Suceed by Jared Diamond
• Why is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Jared Diamond
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle
• The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod (brilliant!)
• The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
• The Double by Jose Saramago
• Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
• The Man who knew Infinity (on Srinivasa Ramanujan) by Robert Kanigel (probably my favorite book of all time!)
• A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (also try the movie. I liked the book more though!)
• Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem
• The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Show Business by Shashi Tharoor
• Roadside picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• The Glass Bees by Ernst Junger
• The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor
• Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
• Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick
• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare
• The Vintage Bradbury : Ray Bradbury's Own Selection of His Best Stories by Ray Bradbury
• Driving Blind : Stories by Ray Bradbury
• A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury
• Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• Blindness by Jose Saramago
• Mark Twain : Four Complete Novels : The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn/ The Price and the Pauper/A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
• The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose
• Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone
• Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts
• Four Colours Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved by Robin Wilson
• Journey into Light: Life and Science of C.V. Raman by G. Venkataraman
• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
• The Essence of Chaos by Edward N. Lorenz
• Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
• Casanova in Bohemia by Andrei Codrescu
• The Unbearble Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (also Philip Kaufman's movie starring Juliette Binoche)
• Identity : A Novel by Milan Kundera
• Hilbert by Constance Reid
• The Calcutta Chromosome : A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery by Amitav Ghosh
• Will to Freedom : A Perilous Journey Through Fascism and Communism by Egon Balas
  (Egon Balas is a widely respected professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh)
• Selected Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore
• Cosmicomics (my favorite Italo Calvino) by Italo Calvino
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
• The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (Vols 1,3 and 5) by Philip K. Dick
• Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
• The Tale of the Unknown Island by Jose Saramago
• All the Names by Jose Saramago
• The Plague by Albert Camus
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• The Fall by Albert Camus
• The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser
• Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry
• The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri (incidentally Manil Suri is a professor of Applied Math at University of Maryland, Baltimore)
• Arresting God in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay
• Mathematical Mountaintops : The Five Most Famous Problems of All Time by John Casti (sure it's nonfiction and not a Math textbook :-), but I think Casti does a fine job!)
• Mathematics - The New Golden Age by Keith Devlin (similar to Casti's book, but probably more clear and concise!. Again it's only nonfiction, and not a Math textbook :-))
• Godel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics by John Casti (not as good as Reid's book on Hilbert, but we are not only talking about Godel in his book; his famous 'incompleteness' theorem clearly outshines Godel's personal life and his paranoia!)
• The History of Jazz by Ted Giola (A good overview on Jazz, one of America's greatest gifts to the world!)
• The Abominable Man by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (also the movie "The man on the roof" directed by Bo Widerberg)
• The Locked Room: The Story of a crime by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
• Death of a Salesperson by Robert Barnard
• High Spirits by Robertson Davies
• Cathedral by Raymond Carver
• What We Talk About When We Talk about Love : Stories by Raymond Carver
• Short Cuts (also Robert Altman's movie) by Raymond Carver
• Illusions by Richard Bach
• Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
• Slaughterhouse Five (also the movie by George Roy Hill) by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Cyberiad : Fables for the Cybernetic Age by Stanislaw Lem
• Solaris (also the movie by Andrei Tarkovsky) by Stanislaw Lem
• L.A. Confidential (also Curtis Hanson's movie) by James Ellroy
• Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis
• The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull : A Story by Richard Bach
• The Big Sleep (also the movie starring Humphery Bogart and Lauren Bacall) by Raymond Chandler
• Farwell my lovely (also Dick Richards's movie) by Raymond Chandler
• The Long Goodbye (also Robert Altman's movie) by Raymond Chandler
• Ramayana by C. Rajagopalachari (Rajagopalachari was the "first Indian Governor General" of India :-)
• Mahabharata by C. Rajagopalachari
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
• The Grifters by Jim Thompson
• Time and Again by Jack Finney
• Invasion of the body snatchers (also Don Siegel's 1956 movie) by Jack Finney
• The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein (his short stories especially "And he built a crooked house" and "All You Zombies") by Robert Heinlein
• The Guide : A Novel by R.K. Narayan
• The Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan
• Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan
• Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
• The Adventures of Asterix (all of them!) by Rene de Goscinny
• The Complete Tintin by Herge
• Collected Stories (Perennial Classics) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh by Evelyn Waugh
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (also Milos Forman's movie starring Jack Nicholson) by Ken Kesey
• A Clockwork Orange (also try Stanley Kubrick's movie) by Anthony Burgess
• Numbers in the Dark by Italo Calvino
• The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
• The Music of Chance by Paul Auster (also watch the movie by Philip Haas)
• The Collected Plays of Neil Simon (especially "The Odd Couple", also the movie starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau) by Neil Simon
• Nine Fairy Tales : And One more thrown in for Good Measure by Karel Capek
• Lolita (also try Stanley Kubrick's film) by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Short Stories of Tennessee Williams by Tennessee Williams
• A Streetcar Named Desire (also the movie starring Marlon Brando) by Tennessee Williams
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the movie Bladerunner) by Philip K. Dick
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
• The Philip K. Dick Reader (his short stories especially "Second Variety" and "We can remember it for you wholesale"( the movie Total Recall)) by Philip K. Dick
• Ubik by Philip K. Dick
• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
• Double Star by Robert Heinlein
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Remains of the Day (also the movie starring Anthony Hopkins) by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Life A Users Manual by Georges Perec
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
• Mr Tompkins in Paperback by George Gamow
• The Foundation series by Issac Asimov
• 2001 : A Space Odyssey (after reading this, try out Stanley Kubrick's movie) by Arthur Clarke
• Coolie by Mulk Raj Anand
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Roots by Alex Haley
• Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
• The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
• Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman by Edward Hutchings (Editor)
• Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
• Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins
• Life at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse
• The Best of Roald Dahl by Roald Dahl
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• The Complete Yes Minister : The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by Jonathan Lynn
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes : All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Anton Chekhov's Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
• The Complete Short Stories of O. Henry by O. Henry
• Saki : The Complete Saki by H.H. Munro (Saki)
• The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
• The Best Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant
• The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells by H.G. Wells
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
• The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
• Proofs from the Book by Martin Aigner and Gunter Ziegler
• Saucerful of Secrets : The Pink Floyd Odyssey by Nicholas Schaffner
• The French Mathematician by Tom Petsinis
• Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
• Fermat's Enigma : The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh
• Cracking India : A Novel by Bapsi Sidhwa
• Swimming Lessons : And Other Stories from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry
• Love and Longing in Bombay : Stories by Vikram Chandra
• Snake Charmer by Sanjay Nigam
• Beach Boy by Ardashir Vakil
• The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• Mirrorwork : 50 Years of Indian Writing : 1947-1997 by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (Editors)
• The Sweet Hereafter (also the movie by Atom Egoyan) by Russell Banks
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro : And Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway