An Update on my Reading for the Read Non-Fiction Challenge 2026

As some of you may recall, I signed up for the #readnonficchallenge2026 hosted by Shelley Rae. It’s a simple one – you can read as many books as you want, with a minimum of three and a maximum of 12. You can choose them within her given prompts or just read any books of your choice. Eight months into the year, I have read 22 books with seven of them being non-fiction. I had intended to read six non-fiction books but now that I have crossed that number, I will attempt to read at least nine, if not twelve! So, this is a check-in post along with my reviews.

1. Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments by Eric Chopra

Category in the Challenge: Subculture

Goodreads Blurb:
Delhi is haunted—by its ghosts, its ruins, and its unending capacity for rebirth. In the shadow of medieval mosques and Mughal tombs, the past refuses to stay buried. Saints, Sultans, poets, and lovers—all linger in the city’s imagination, their stories shaping how we remember what once was.

In Ghosted, historian and storyteller Eric Chopra journeys through the capital’s most beguiling sites—Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, the Mutiny Memorial, and Malcha Mahal—to unearth a Delhi that exists between worlds: a palimpsest where Sufis bless kings, jinn listen to grievances, and begums occupy dilapidated hunting lodges. What begins as a search for Delhi’s haunted monuments becomes a meditation on why we are drawn to the dead and how ghost stories become vessels of collective memory.

Blending archival research with folklore, myth, and reflection, Chopra paints an intimate portrait of a city forever in dialogue with its former selves. Through invasions and rebirths, he reveals that Delhi’s spirit resides not just in its monuments but in the unseen presences that linger among them.

Ghosted is a lyrical, haunting journey through the city’s spectral landscape— an invitation to listen to what its echoes tell us about memory and identity.

My Review:

Eric Chopra is a historian and a fellow Stephanian, so I was very excited to read this book.
I can sense his passion for the subject and he’s put in a lot of work as far as research is concerned. But his writing is just dull – he managed to make an interesting subject very ho-hum. I don’t want to judge too harshly because I’ve definitely read worse non-fiction, but I’ve also read much much better non-fiction! An average book.

Rating: 3/5

Link to Buy the Book: https://amzn.in/d/00V0rhqr

• Brush With Life: An Autobiography by Satish Gujral

Category in the Challenge: Memoir / Biography

Goodreads Blurb:

Satish Gujral was one of India’s most original modern artists-painter, sculptor, muralist, architect, and writer-whose work crossed disciplines and eras. Born in Jhelum, undivided India, he lost his hearing as a child after a near-fatal accident. What might have confined him instead became the source of a lifelong search for form and meaning.

From his training at the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore and his years in Mexico under the influence of Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, to his return to a newly independent India, Gujral shaped a practice that was both deeply personal and politically alert. His paintings, sculptures, and buildings bear witness to a sensibility that refused to separate art from life.

First published in 1997, A Brush with Life remains a lucid and unsparing account of an artist’s journey through loss, conviction, and renewal. Reissued to mark his centenary, this edition includes a new foreword by Mohit Gujral and the original one by Khushwant Singh. It offers readers a portrait of a man who turned silence into vision, and who saw creation itself as an act of courage.

My Review:

I picked this book up as research for an article I’m writing on the artist Satish Gujral whose centenary is being celebrated this year, but I ended up thoroughly enjoying it. Gujral overcame his physical disability (he couldn’t hear) and became one of India’s finest artists and architects. His story is interesting and inspiring in its own right, but he’s also a wonderful writer who shares memories and feelings with candour and brings his story to life through apt descriptions and vivid characterisation. The book was originally published in 1997 and has been re-released this year for his centenary. Yet it doesn’t feel dated – a testament to the extraordinary life of an extraordinary man.

Rating: 4/5

• I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki: Further Conversations with My Psychiatrist by Baek Sehee

Category in the Challenge: Health

Goodreads Blurb:

The sequel to the Sunday Times and international-bestselling South Korean therapy memoir, translated by International Booker Prize-shortlisted Anton Hur

When Baek Sehee started recording her sessions with her psychiatrist, her hope was to create a reference for herself. She never imagined she would reach so many people, especially young people, with her reflections. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki became a runaway bestseller in South Korea, Indonesia, and the U.S., and reached a community of readers who appreciated depression and anxiety being discussed with such intimacy. Baek’s struggle with dysthymia continues in I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki. And healing is a difficult process; the inner conflict she experiences in treatment becomes more complex, more challenging. With this second book, Baek Sehee reaches out to hold the hands of all those for whom grappling with everyday despair is part of a lifelong project, part of the journey.

My Review:

This book is the sequel to the original book where Baek Sehee recounted conversations with her psychiatrist as she received treatment for her depression. The book was a bestseller which led to this second edition. I haven’t read the first one.

My thoughts on this?
Quite honestly, this is the kind of book that you either love or dislike immensely. And sadly for me this was the latter. I found the conversations boring and the concerns expressed far removed from my life. Even just reading a page would put me to sleep. But I can appreciate that others may identify with the issues highlighted. It just wasn’t for me!

Rating: 2/5

Link to Buy the Book: https://amzn.in/d/0i2MsyDD

• The Liver Doctor: Stories of Love, Loss and Regeneration by Cyriac Abby Philips

Category of the Challenge: Science

Goodreads Blurb:

I did not become a doctor to help people cheat death, but to help them understand it.

In The Liver Doctor, Dr Cyriac Abby Philips, expert hepatologist and one of India’s most vocal advocates of science-led medicine, tells us the fascinating story of the least understood, most indispensable and only self-regenerating organ in the human body-the liver.

With the searing precision of a scientist, the empathy of a doctor who witnesses the fragility of the human body every day and the dogged curiosity of a detective, Dr Philips dives into ancient myths and legends through various cultures, the annals of history as well as his own deeply personal encounters from his life as a doctor, taking his readers on a wondrous journey where belief collides with data and hope is tested against prognosis.

Along the way, he asks the uncomfortable questions that modern physicians often ask. How much certainty should medicine promise? When does treatment become harm? And how do doctors and caregivers live with decisions that cannot be undone?

In the end, The Liver Doctor becomes a treatise on the history and evolution of medical science itself-one that will leave you informed and poignantly unsettled, long after the last page is turned.

My Review:

I would never have picked this book if I hadn’t been commissioned to interview the author / doctor for an article. I was completely unaware of the importance of the liver in the human body and had never heard of this doctor before (even though he’s kind of a social media celebrity). In that respect, the book was eye-opening and informative. It was also written in an engaging manner so the medical jargon wasn’t boring or overwhelming.

What didn’t work, however, was the excessive repetition of the subject matter. To the doctor, each story may have seemed different but to an average reader – or at least to me – every case sounded the same after a while and I really struggled to finish the book. The doctor really dislikes Ayurveda and traditional medicine and highlighted numerous cases of liver damage due to intake of these meds – another fact that’s repeated way too many times in the same book. Also, the doctor has a tendency to become overly sentimental in his writing. It seems childish after a while.

Should you read it? Maybe. I thought it was strictly ok but maybe you enjoy reading about medical issues and will like it.

Rating: 3/5

Link to Buy the Book: https://amzn.in/d/0iV5rlRt

• The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary by Amitava Kumar

Category of the Challenge: Lost or Found

Goodreads Blurb:

One day passes. Then another. A whole succession of days turning into months and years. How to mark our separate days? The places we have been. Our individual passions, our pain. Against the blurring of years, the clarity of a record. And even amidst crises, how to keep creativity alive?

Also, how to stop time?

After the first wave of Covid had passed, the lockdown was lifted and travel resumed in earnest. Amitava Kumar found himself in London with a group of American students on a study tour-in the midst of the Omicron wave. A year later, he was in India, in his native Motihari among other places. Meanwhile, Russia attacked Ukraine and Rushdie was assaulted with a knife in upstate New York. Amitava kept a journal-to record the times he was living through and how he would like to remember them.

In these pages, through words and drawings, an acclaimed author and artist reveals how a writer observes the world around us-and the world inside us. The Yellow Book, like The Blue Book, shows us how we can put together not just a journal or a book, but also how we assemble a life; and, in our troubled times, why we must plant memories and continue to believe in spring.

My Review:

I picked this book because I thought it would fit the monthly prompt of a reading challenge I’m doing. It didn’t, but I ended up loving it. An easy breezy read that consists of diary entries – both visual and textual – of the writer’s life through the years 2021 and 2022. He writes through Covid, Trump’s re-election, Russia’s attack on Ukraine and also some personal milestones like the death of his father. It’s engaging, real, raw but also very literary, which in my opinion, is quite a writerly feat to have achieved! I highly recommend it.

Rating: 4/5

Link to Buy the Book: https://amzn.in/d/0hUfpN4A

• Yeh Dil Maange More: Remembering Captain Vikram Batra, My Brother by Vishal Batra and Anupma Mehta

Category for the Challenge: Published in 2026

Blurb:

Yeh Dil Maange More is the story of a hero who never truly left us. When captain Vikram Batra ascended the unseen mountains of Kargil, he carried a nation’s hopes on his shoulders. When he returned wrapped in the tricolour, he became immortal.

A heartbreaking and deeply inspiring true story of martyr Captain Vikram Batra, Param Vir Chakra awardee and the face of India’s victory in the 1999 Kargil war. Told through the eyes of his identical twin brother, these pages carry the memories no history book ever captured. From their childhood days to the unbearable silence left behind after the war took one of them away.

This is not just a portrait of a battle. It is a story about love, loss, courage, family and the price of patriotism. It is about a twenty-four-year old Indian army officer who smiled in the face of death and whose words, “Either I will come back after hoisting the tricolour, or I will come back wrapped in it”, still send shivers through the heart of a nation.

Raw, intimate and unforgettable, Yeh Dil Maange More is a tribute to every soldier who never came home, to every family that continues to wait and to every Indian who still feels a surge of emotions on hearing the name ‘Captain Vikram Batra’.

My Review:

Everyone knows about Capt. Vikram Batra, the war hero from the 1999 Kargil war. But this book brings to life Vikram Batra, the person, as seen from his identical twin’s perspective. It’s an incredible story – twins, war, a love story, a charming hero, and oodles of patriotism – and it’s all true. The book explores the twins’ student lives and the final important months leading up to the war. It’s well-written and engaging. It does however, seem a little rushed and devoid of detail. There was scope to go deeper. It would have also been interesting to learn more about Vishal Batra’s life.

Rating: 4/5

Link to Buy the Book: https://amzn.in/d/02sGo13j

• Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

Category for the Challenge: History

Goodreads Blurb:

‘The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing.’

Natalia Ginzburg wrote her masterful, Strega Prize winning novel Family Lexicon while living in London in the 1960s. Homesick for her big, noisy Italian family, she summoned them in this novel, which is a celebration of the routines and rituals, in-jokes and insults and, above all, the repeated sayings that make up every family.

The father, Giuseppe Levi, is a Jewish scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking. Impatient and intractable, he is constantly at odds with his impressionable and wistful wife Lidia – yet he cannot be without her. Together they preside over their five children in a house filled with argument and activity, books and politics, visitors, friends and famous faces. But as their children grow up against the backdrop of Mussolini’s Italy, the Levi household must become not only a home – but a stronghold against fascism.

Intimate, enchanting and comedic, Family Lexicon is an unforgettable novel about memory, language, and the lasting power that family holds over all of us.

My Review:

This autobiography is a real and raw look at its writer’s family dynamics. She focuses on her parents and siblings and shows them quite honestly with their many foibles. But she also clearly loves them. She writes that the book is an attempt at saving the family lore, the quirky statements and language used by her family members, but as the time she writes of is based around the rise and eventual fall of fascism in Italy (around World War II), the book ends up being much more than a mere family memoir.

She is a good writer as she is able to express many feelings without putting them on paper. But the book is quite bereft of detail on the actual war and her Jewish family’s suffering through it. It also lacks a novel-like narrative, so it’s not for everyone.

Overall, however, I thought it was an easy and enjoyable read – quite funny in places – that shared a glimpse of a time and perspective in history I wasn’t familiar with. One should know that it is written in a slightly archaic style because it was written in the 1960s about events from the 1920s-40s.

Rating: 3/5

Link to Buy the Book: https://amzn.in/d/0cWbtGcQ

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This blog post is part of ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’ hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla in collaboration with​ Tanvi Agarwal.

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