At this time of year, many newspapers publish such lengthy lists of must-read books that it's daunting to even imagine them all piled up gathering dust on the bedside table. So let me narrow the field by sharing some amazing titles about or from Asia that I have enjoyed over the past year.

Top billing goes to "Righteous Republic" by Ananya Vajpeyi, an engaging intellectual history that helps us better understand 21st-century India. Vajpeyi examines five giants involved in the founding of the republic in 1950 — Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhimrao Ambedkar — who all drew inspiration from indigenous traditions as they strove to craft a postcolonial Indian identity.

She writes of how, "in the process of becoming a modern democracy, her founders reject the violence of the nation-state (Gandhi), reject nationalism as an ideology (Rabindranath), transform a nonmodern and sectarian history into an enabling precursor for secular democratic modernity (Nehru), and shift the bases of human happiness from the pursuit of individual interest to the alleviation of social suffering (Ambedkar)."