BATB score: 6/10 🥶 Best as: 400+ pages long novel about the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, about never truly knowing your mother’s story, and re-kindling what seems impossible BATB lingering thought: it’s just long~~~~ Best for: you know how your mother is your worst enemy; this novel shares two daughters’ journey to try to unlock mom 🥹 Best to: are you willing to put in the work to re-kindle with mom, knowing that a better relationship can exist? cue psycho

BATB score: 6/10 👩‍⚕️ 🩸 Freida McFadden, girlfriend, this book wasn’t it Best to: a re-edit of her book Suicide Med 2014 with 20% plot optimizations and cutdowns; Dead Med 2024 was still 450+ pages long and was sorta kinda almost but not a hit Best for: if you haven’t read anything Frieda McFadden, check out The Housemaid, The Boyfriend, or Never Lie first and foremost Best as: oiii so many characters and intertwined stories, readers must try to keep up BATB lingering thoug

BATB score: 6/10 ↗️ Best to: the difference between extrinsic motivated / Type X person vs an intrinsic motivated / Type I person; and how you should strive to be the latter “My hope is that at our 25th reunion our class will not be known for how much money we made or how much money we gave back to the school, but for how the world was a better place as a result of our leadership.” Best as: why rewarding your team’s hard work with monetary gains can be detrimental and toxic;

BATB score: 6/10 🐈‍⬛ Best as: a mortician answers every death related questions asked by innocent children Best to: hilarious but educational like will I shit my pants when I die Best for: well, don’t you want to know whether you will shit your pants when you die? BATB lingering thought: yes, you will shit your pants when you die and yes, morticians are cool with it; though they may put a pampers on / butt plug in you to make sure your funeral is decent

BATB score: 6/10 🫠 Best as: a very long suspense, thriller, murder, crime scene investigation novel; with all those pages and words yet character love wasn’t established #bummer Best to: great interesting and rewarding ending just took a long time to get there; like how there’s a direct route but you took the scenic route which wasn’t that scenic anyways Best for: retired avid readers with a lot of time on your hands and enjoys the reading journey not necessarily the end; ho

BATB score: 6/10 Best as: a complete memoir on how a drug addict is born, how it starts, escalates, cold turkey withdrawals, relapses; and how it effects everyone in your life 💯 BATB lingering thought: how pleasurably addictive is it that you don’t think about dying but merely to get high 🤔 Best to: he wrote this memoir in a psych ward upon his third suicide attempt Best for: aren’t we all addicts of some sort? - everything escalated from there Best quotes: “Drugs are my on

BATB score: 6/10 🫥 Best as: 65% Sam Carr’s memoir on loneliness; 35% other people’s telltale on loneliness Best to: in need of roughly 15% more scientific data, experimental reference, tangible substance or else it’s just storytelling Best for: this book is not worth your PhD 😬 Best quotes: “We come into the world alone and we die alone. Why, in life, should we be any less alone?” “There is cruel irony in the fact that the relationships that play such a critical role in def

BATB score: 6/10 🍜 *reader discretion advised* you must get past the first part, first 100 pages, and then you’re good; it only gets more tolerable, interesting, and relatable from there Best as: this is not a book, this is a white paper research thesis circling around this one premise “ultra-processed food (UPF) is the cause of our over-eating, obesity, and other health problems” and thus why current FDA is inadequate, why blaming lack of exercise, a low-nutrients, high-car

BATB score: 6/10 💃🏻 🕺 *great book title 👏 metaphorically descriptive and conclusive: men and women are polar opposites 🪐☄️ Best as: written by a relationship counselor back in 1992; 33 years later, a lot of the premises are still true Best to: however, gender-role association may not be that straightforward; there’s more than two genders now and gender-role characteristics are more fluid BATB lingering thought: and that’s why we need marriage counseling (and maybe that’s

BATB score: 6/10 🥴 *reader discretion advised* side back story, after watching “Poor Things” the movie featuring Emma Stone IMDb 8.3, BATB wants to understand what kind of novel [1992] gets selected for film-adaption [2023] Best as: oh shit, the original novel by Alasdair Gray vs the academy award film by Yorgos Lanthimos is two different individually unique masterpiece 👀 Best to: the novel structure is split based on the characters point of view, written in a memoir first-

BATB score: 6/10 🤖 meh. introduction to Microsoft company culture and 2030s vision under Satya Nadella’s ruling; fun fact, AI investment was already in the works since 2017 👏 Microsoft and OpenAI 🚀 Best for: if you are applying for a director role at Microsoft Best to: mister growth mindset, c in ceo stands for culture, one team one dream, learning from on-ground consumers, partners, and competitors, serving a sole north star “to empower every person and organization on th

BATB score: 6/10 😂 *reader discretion advised* BATB just wanted to know how did this comedian, Matt Rife, ended up on BATB’s For You feed?!? Best as: ahh okay, Matt Rife has always wanted to be a comedian and so he did! by self-sponsoring his first stand up show, posting clips on all social media, hit the jackpot with Tiktok For You algorithm, and boom ta da! 🎉 world tour sold out 👏 Netflix Christmas special and wrote a memoir 🤯 took 12 years Best for: you must have seen

BATB score: 6/10 😑 Best as: this book could have been an email - Morgan Housel were you in a rush to publish? Best to: wealth is “the family you’ve built, the friends you’ve found, the memories you have, and the wisdom you’ve accumulated” Best for: anyone who has yet figured out how much is enough Best quotes: “the goal was not to make a living; it was to make a life, and only a fool would sacrifice his actual life for the endless pursuit of an imaginarily better one.” “One

BATB score: 6/10 🤔 a BATB re-read in memory of Baek Sehee #RIP Best to: we don’t know why Baek Sehee passed away at 35 years old though I do hope she passed away peacefully or at the very least at peace finally BATB lingering thought: from re-reading her book on her mental struggles - persistent depressive disorder - and her POV on free death, you have your suspicions but it doesn’t matter Best as: if that’s really the case, according to the details of the book, I don’t thin

BATB score: 6/10 🙃 Best to: a pastime read to accompany your slow life upon retirement BATB lingering thought: maybe we leave the long novels for later Best as: oldest / original daughter dilemma, mother’s disappointment in daughter, sisters passive aggressive rivalry, so who takes care of mother when she’s on her deathbed? Best for: only if you are an oldest daughter in an asian family Best quotes: “There was considerable freedom to be had in knowing and accepting that I wa

BATB score: 6/10 🔪 🩸 Best for: McFans - Freida McFadden loyal fans Best to: a classic Freida McFadden twist and turn suspenseful fiction Best as: reading for fun Best quote: “Is it such an awful thing to want retribution against people who have wronged you?”

BATB score: 6/10 🤝 content is quite common sense for millennials Best as: once Gen X workforce retires, roughly 2030, dear millennials it’s our time to rise up and enforce work life separation! 4-day work week💥 unlimited leave day 💥 work as a means to an end 💥 attack! Best for: millennials in the workforce, we are the adults in the room now Best to: millennials leaders to have a social media presence, awareness about diversity, equity, and inclusion, leadership with trans

BATB score: 6/10 🙄 Best to: mental illness runs in the family from alcoholic mother, to bipolar brother, to two siblings committing suicide BATB lingering thought: interesting, mental illnesses have been around since 1980s, has it gotten worse or just more vocal or both Best as: a memoir written by Meg Kissinger for Meg Kissinger to reminisce and make peace with everything Best for: it would have been more enjoyable if you knew the Kissinger, if not it’s too long and wordy B

BATB score: 6/10 Best to: pretty much common sense on what not to do when you get old but a good reminder nonetheless Best as: a fun and funny read Best for: a memoir of a 60+ year old, Steven Petrow, renowned Washington Post and New York Times journalist, yet his most treasured memories were not about work; anybody who needs this reminder Best quotes: “each of us is old when we think we are - when we accept an attitude of dormancy, dependence on others, a substantial limitat

BATB score: 6/10 🚫 reader discretion advised this book is trying to pitch for an unpopular opinion that “while grit is a virtue, quitting is a vice” that quitting is a winner mentality - tough pitch indeed Best for: when quitting is the better obvious choice, can we clap for quitters? Best to: there are marathon runners who finished the race despite a broken leg because quitting is not an option Best as: applause for the Mount Everest climbers who turned back and didn’t mak