Rohit Somani

Steve Coll's two-volume history of America in Afghanistan

2026-09-29T00:00:00Z

Ghost Wars and Directorate S are really one long book split into two Pulitzer-winning halves.

Ghost Wars covers the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan from the Soviet withdrawal to the day before 9/11: the funding, the double games, and the blind spots that let bin Laden’s network grow largely unchecked.

Directorate S picks up immediately after and follows the next twenty years: the war that followed, and the Pakistani intelligence establishment that spent two decades working both sides of it.

Neither is a quick read, since Coll reports at a level of detail that rewards patience. Back to back, they are the closest thing there is to a definitive account of how a superpower stumbled into, and never quite won, its longest war.

When the United States announced it was leaving Afghanistan this topic piqued my interest and these two books helped satisfy my curiosity. What stands out especially about Coll is style of writing. Getting through 1000+ pages without getting bored says a lot about the book.

Walter Isaacson's biographies of genius

2026-09-29T00:00:00Z

Walter Isaacson has built a career on biographies of people who changed how the rest of us live, and three of his are the ones I keep coming back to.

Steve Jobs shows Jobs at his worst as well as his best. I read this quite early on in my life and what stood out for me was Jobs ability to relentlessly cut out distraction as a hallmark of a great leader. Apart from learning about his life you also get a peak into the traits which made him special.

Leonardo da Vinci treats Leonardo’s restless curiosity as the real subject. It works through the notebooks, the half-finished commissions and the dissections rather than just cataloguing the paintings. Slower than Jobs, and worth the patience.

The Code Breaker is the most recent. It follows Jennifer Doudna and the invention of CRISPR gene editing: part biography, part crash course in the biggest scientific story of the decade.

Different centuries, same underlying question: what obsessive curiosity looks like up close.

Where to start with le Carré's George Smiley

2026-09-29T00:00:00Z

I accidently got introduced to le Carre when I watched the Night Manager on one of the OTT platforms. I liked it enough to sample one of his first’s ‘Tinker Tailor’ and immediately developed a liking for George Smiley, le Carre’s plot development and a general liking for mystery / thriller ;). Now I have read two of the entire series.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the one to read first, and the one to read even if you never pick up another le Carré. It is a patient, meticulous hunt for a Soviet mole inside British intelligence, solved almost entirely through interviews and old files rather than chase scenes, and it is better for it.

A Murder of Quality is an earlier, smaller book: a straightforward murder mystery at an English boarding school, with Smiley called in as a favour to an old friend. It is a good second stop if you want to see le Carré before he became le Carré, still sharp but working in a much tighter frame.

William Dalrymple, three ways into India's buried history

2026-09-29T00:00:00Z

If there’s one writer who can make Delhi’s rubble feel alive, it’s William Dalrymple.

I picked up City of Djinns first, more or less by accident, and it is still the best place to start. Part memoir, part history, it follows him through a year of living in the city and stumbling into its buried layers, from Sufi shrines to the last surviving courtiers of the Raj.

The Last Mughal narrows the lens to a single year, 1857, and the brutal end of nearly three centuries of Mughal rule in Delhi. It is meticulously reported and hard to put down for a work of history.

Age of Kali is the odd one out: a collection of essays from years of travelling through an India in the middle of violent, chaotic change, from Bombay’s underworld to Bihar’s caste wars.

Read together, they are a slow walk through three different Indias: the city as it is now, as it ended, and the country as it was becoming.