BATB score: 8/10 🇰🇵🇰🇷 The other stuff about North Korea beyond the typical authors on defectors, starvation, reunification, and Kims. Best as: a thorough interview style qualitative research on North Korea; discussion of a capitalist movement in a communist country Best for: curious minds on/of North Korea - have you ever wondered where North Korean bought make-up? What kind of sanitary pads they are using? Do they watch porn? Best to: know that the grass is always greene

BATB score: 8.5/10 🩺🩻👩‍⚕️ *Disclaimer* In another life, I do wish to be a surgeon. I do have an unfair favoritism towards doctor/surgeon related books. Best to: Atul Gawande is exceptionally talented in being a surgeon, an author, and a researcher; living proof that you can be and you can nail so many things in one lifetime Best as: so many interesting topics from mysterious illnesses, to when doctors go wild, to real life cases - literally a day in a life of Atul Gawande

BATB score: 8/10 🍋 As the media only covers the political parties and the hard facts, it reduces - the casualties, the victims, the orphans, the displaced - to mere numbers. Some time we forgot that they are people. Best as: this book is a chance for Syrians to have their stories told about longing to the life before, belonging to Syria amidst war, and hope for the future of Syria. Best to: Syrian civil war from March 2011 to present. we will never fully know the true effect

BATB score: 8/10 💕 a few weeks after Osamu Dazai wrote No Longer Human, he and his wife committed suicide by drowning in a canal near their house; that was also a week before his 39th birthday *reader discretion advised* this book is not for everyone; this book covers suicide, addiction, abuse, depression, depersonalization disorder Best to: this book is a semi-autobiography, semi-novel, semi-suicide-death-note; it’s like he is trying to tell us something, a final word to wh

BATB score: 8/10 💙 #BATBREREAD Best as: oddly this book is less interesting and less relevant to me now that I am back to being an individual contributor; plus working remotely (work from home alone forever) removes all of the office politics and office foul plays to zero BATB lingering thought: you literally don’t have to be that bubbly charismatic character any more now that everything is through zoom; that ‘join meeting’’ and that leave meeting’ button is your way in and

BATB score: 8/10 💛 Best as: the most adorable gift you can give to anyone in their 30s; it’s about a typical thirties-year-old version of a mid-life crisis Best to: key takeaways - give less furck about work or quits 9 to 5, loves drinking still and will diet tomorrow, bff is pet cat/dog, learns to live happily alone while being jealous of everybody else 💯 Best for: could 30s be the new midlife? BATB lingering thought: fried chicken with beer is a global meaning of life ❤️

BATB score: 8/10 👏 Best as: you don’t just get an offer to be CEO, you set “CEO” as your life’s goal and work backwards 24 years of career planning and progression to get there Best for: CEO career climbers only - “Many CEOs secretly agree that the best job in the world is actually the one right below the CEO.” Best to: a true playbook on how to get to be CEO, how to be CEO, and how to leave as CEO - lead with the question of “why?” to drive focus, and “why not?” to encourag

BATB score: 8/10 🖤 Best to: it was very close to being very good book yet the 23 concepts were just all over the place; unlike Morgan Housel’s previous BATB 10/10 “Psychology of Money” book that was just about money #duh Best as: back in 1950s, we all were poorer but happier than today and that’s because there was no wealth gap, no one is better off, nothing to envy Best for: I believe many other book review pages would give this book a 10/10 so to avoid FOMO, read it BATB l

BATB score: 8.5/10 💙 *reader discretion advised* this book on anxiety and panic attacks can trigger anxiety and panic attacks 🫨 Best to: as a national correspondent queued to be on LIVE television in five, four, [mouth reads] three, two, one; are your hands sweaty? is your heart rate rising? is your mouth quivering? why is the perfection stigma so psychologically decapitating? Best for: anyone who can relate to this quote > “Why was it that I seemed to be more afraid of the

BATB score: 8/10 🌸 *reader discretion advised* an advanced white paper making a breakthrough point on how the body says ’NO’ to a life spent living for someone else via chronic illnesses Best to: a sentence from the book that best describe the mood and tone and the premise of the book > “The dynamic interplay between social-conflict events and joint pain describe a homeostatic system in which negative social interaction is regulated through worsening of the disease.” Best fo

BATB score: 8/10 🤩 *Pulitzer Prize Winner 2023 for outstanding public service and achievement in American journalism; Hua Hsu is a second-generation Taiwanese American immigrant* Best to: eloquently written *clap clap* captivating becoming-of-age memoir with a little tragedy; there were moments when I was bored but it’s art BATB lingering thought: so how would you describe friendship? “Everybody likes something - a song, a movie, a TV show - so you choose not to; this is how

BATB score: 8/10 ❤️ *TED Talk is hands down the epitome of world class public speaking - this book is all you need to know* Best to: why speak when this could have been an email you ask? because, “It’s the human overlay that turns information into inspiration.” Best as: an exhaustive lists of all the nooks and crannies to public speaking including how to start, how to finish, to memorize or not to memorize, what to wear, and how to save your presentation file in zip format *y

BATB score: 8.5/10 👀 Best for: raise your hand if you agree with any part this statement: I, personally, feel that my attention span is fleeting, that I have difficulty concentrating, that my relationship with social media is toxic, and that my wrists ache from holding a mobile phone up too long. 🙆🏻‍♀️ Best to: the book acknowledges that we all have shorter attention spans and more difficulty with concentration; the book then explores twelve potential causes to why this is

BATB score: 8/10 👏 *reader discretion advised* this is not a book, this is a white paper research on how homo sapiens can better communicate with other homo sapiens *advanced reading level required* there are some very good chapters and some very meh chapters; the long, various his/her/their anecdotes makes it boring at times Best as: very well-researched, extremely academic, theoretical dump, nerdy read Best for: Yuval Noah Harari would love this book as it is advocating fo

BATB Score: 8/10 🕵️‍♀️ “People die too easily. It should be more painful, and take longer.” - a glimpse into the minds of killers Best as: Between Good and Evil: A Master Profiler's Hunt for Society's Most Violent Predators; the firsthand experiences of a criminal profiler through the gruesome violent homicides and savage rape cases 💯 Best for: a life in a life of a serial killer profiler, detective, forensics, cop, psychologist combine Best to: this book could have been a

BATB Score: 8.5/10 👏 *reader discretion advise* this is not a book; this is a white-paper research document proposing one single premise that mobile phone x the internet x social media, all from 2010 onwards is creating an anxious generation with weakening mental health and detrimental life consequences Best for: read this book if this is you - “The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently w

BATB Score: 8.5/10 🤯 BATB wanted to know what kind of masterpiece writing does it take to win 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature (also congratulations Han Kang well-deserved 👏 ) Best to: eloquence in narration - word choice, sentence structure, convey character emotions, graphic narration, oddest plot, open-ended confusing ending Best as: imagine being award with the utmost prize of 2024 for something you wrote in 2007, which was only translated in 2015, to someone like me just

BATB score: 8/10 👏 Best to: what better way to learn about addiction from addicts; why our addiction to pleasure is causing us pain - easy, clear, simple, I understood everything Best as: why nicotine is better than sex (and probably why people smoke after sex), why drug addictions cause prolonged pain that becomes too painful to live ever without the drug - vicious cycle Best for: we are all addicts in one way or another, the first cure is to be honest about it (at least to

BATB score: varies based on your nationality BATB score: 4/10 if you are Thai, born and raised, you don’t have to read this book we know this by heart BATB score: 8/10 if you are an expat in a leadership role in Thailand, also wtf are you doing in my country taking c-level roles that are better off lead by true-thais?! just because we are developing doesn’t mean that you-developed can march in and claim supremacy; why? just because you have a soothing English accent, oh god,

BATB score: 8/10 💠 you know some people intentionally have affairs in dreams? Best to: if we live until 90 years old, of which we would have spent 30 years just sleeping and 25% of that sleep in REM, we would have spent 7.5 years (literally) dreaming 💭 Best for: now you can be conscious in your dreams, imagine if you can control your dreams and put them to better use ie. entertainment, exploration (of unethical dilemmas), experimentation, and/or enlightenment 🤯 Best as: di