Movie stars — they’re just like us. Except when they aren’t. Because while most of us are busy doom-scrolling between caffeine hits, Saif Ali Khan is probably stretched out on a couch somewhere, sipping a single malt and reading about Japanese ghosts, Greek goddesses, or a crime saga set on Delhi’s dusty outskirts.
It tracks.
Saif’s bookshelf has always mirrored the man himself — layered, literary, slightly left of centre. The thinking Nawab who quotes Homer between takes, debates food politics over dinner, and drifts easily from Shakespeare to Kishore Kumar. In our recent digital cover interview, when we asked him for his five all-time favourite reads, the list that emerged felt distinctly Saif: intellectually curious, a touch gothic, quietly rebellious, and impossible to pin down.
Here’s what’s on his shelf.
Black River by Nilanjana S. Roy
Black River by Nilanjana S. RoyAmazon
Set in Teetarpur, a village just outside Delhi, Black River begins with the murder of eight-year-old Munia — and unspools into a haunting portrait of a country in moral freefall.
On paper, it’s a crime novel. In practice, it’s a meditation on grief, religion, and the violence of everyday life. Roy’s writing is lyrical yet relentless, a literary crime novel that hits close to home.
Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes
Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie HaynesAmazon
Of course Saif reads Greek mythology. But in true Saif Ali Khan fashion, he picks the version that flips the power dynamic.
Natalie Haynes, a comedian-classicist hybrid, resurrects the women of Olympus — the ones history turned into villains, footnotes, or cautionary tales. Pandora, Medea, Clytemnestra, Medusa — all reexamined not as hysterical archetypes but as complex, clever, furious humans.
Haynes writes with bite and humour, weaving Beyoncé lyrics with Euripides in a way that feels both timeless and pop-culture-savvy. Also, a book that defends Medusa? Very Esquire-core.
Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead by Gayathri Prabhu
Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead by Gayathri PrabhuAmazon
“Vetaal who is neither living nor dead…” If that line doesn’t sound like the start of something deliciously eerie, what does?
In this inventive retelling of one of India’s oldest myth cycles, she resurrects the eerie dance between King Vikram and his undead storyteller. But this isn’t your grandmother’s Vikram-Betaal. Prabhu folds in a Victorian explorer, queerness, gender fluidity, and modern anxieties until the text becomes a hall of mirrors — part gothic fable, part metafiction, part fever dream.
It’s wild, intelligent, and audaciously Indian.
Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn
Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio HearnAmazon
“He retold all these Japanese ghost stories in this amazing, amazing poetic prose,” Saif tells us, his voice tinged with admiration.
Written by a half-Irish wanderer who fell in love with Japan, these ghost stories are more than tales of the uncanny. They’re whispers from the borderlands — between cultures, between the living and the dead, between beauty and terror. Paintings that breathe, brides who return from the grave, headless spirits drifting through the mist — each story reads like a fragment of poetry carved from nightmare.
The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering by Ramesh Menon
The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering by Ramesh MenonAmazon
Every thinking man returns, eventually, to the epics. And in Saif’s case, it’s the grandest of them all. Menon’s modern retelling of The Mahabharata is sprawling, cinematic, and deeply philosophical. Across 100,000 couplets, he distills war, morality, fate, and kinship into prose that feels urgent, almost modern.
"I love epics...The Iliad, The Odyssey, I've read all of them," Saif said.
Menon’s version brings it alive for modern readers without losing its spiritual weight. It’s storytelling on a cosmic scale.
