12 Books Devina Mehra Loved Reading In 2024

Listing books of her choice, among the ones she reads during the year, is ace investor Devina Mehra's favourite year-end activity. She says it's a daunting task to pick around 12 books from a list of 50.

"This has been a year of re-reading, ranging from old favourites-Bertrand Russell, Sudha Murthy and Mahadevi Verma to Robert Fulgum, Agatha Christie and even Enid Blyton," she writes.

She also read P.G. Wodehouse's autobiographical works, and was fascinated at how much effort, thought and craft went into what look like easy breezy, off-the-cuff books. "It's a treasure-trove for his fans and for those who want to write fiction," she writes.

Here are her top picks, in no particular order, and a bit about them in her own words.

Business Adventures | John Brooks

This book, which consists of powerfully and engagingly written business stories mostly from 1930 to 1960s, is listed among the favorites by the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

Right on the first page, Brooks writes about the economic advantages of stock exchanges and “the disadvantage (that) they provide an all too convenient way for the unlucky, the imprudent, and the gullible to lose their money”. He further talks about how the exchanges have a whole pattern of social behavior, with customs, language and glib explanations of any and every event. Fascinatingly, all these patterns appeared soon after the first stock exchange was established in Amsterdam in 1602. We may be using high-tech computers now, but human nature does not change. That’s why it is illuminating to read business and finance stories which may be decades old.

There is more enlightening stuff like how the entire phenomenon of income taxes is just over a century old. And how much resistance there was to even a 10 per cent income tax in most jurisdictions and how soon it crossed 90 per cent.

Fire on the Ganges | Radhika Iyengar