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The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
BATB score: 6/10 🫥 love the fun fact scientific research references; hate the personal vlogs Best to: one year happiness project with monthly OKRs to appreciate the mundane and be a kinder person Best for: happy people are scientifically proven to be more physically attractive 😎 Best as: a very slow book for endless mellow rainy days Best quotes: “To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.” “We hugged for at


Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading by Chris Anderson
BATB score: 2/10 💥 *reader discretion advised* mean girls mode activated - this book is a waste of time 🙄 Best to: okie I acknowledge the good intentions, kudos to Chris Anderson for starting TEDTalk / TEDx and his generosity for knowledge worth sharing; the book is trying to share efforts, tips, techniques and inspire how one can be more generous yet this 200+ pages book would have better been a 18-minutes TEDTalk Best as: that’s why all philanthropic non-profit organizati


This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Philipps
BATB score: 1/10 💔 the book title has nothing to do with anything in the book Best as: Busy Philipps diary written for Busy Philipps; no tangible key takeaway just an FYI recollection of things that happened from teen pregnancy, to actress auditioning, to instagram stories, to Trump - this book does not change lives Best for: Busy Philipps and nobody else Best to: what did you want your readers to takeaway from this book, could have been a really good start before writing th


Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson
*disastrous books that have been wasting my time* BATB score: 1/10 😡 Best burn: well, if you are just going to discuss the frequently asked questions without actually answering them, please go away. Best to: keep the conversation in podcast format, unlike book readers, podcast listeners are more forgiving Best as: the book cover is cute 🦖 🦕 Best for: nobody, not intellectual stimulating, a waste of money and time


Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu
*disastrous books that have been wasting my time* BATB score: 1/10 😤 Best burn: if you assign a high school student to write a book on K-beauty (who, what, when, where, why, how, thoughts), you will get this book. Meet expectations. Best as: if you want to know what is botox Best to: know that Elise Hu, the author, is not the lady on the book cover Best for: nobody, not intellectual stimulating, a waste of money, a waste of time


When the Body Says NO: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté
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


Lighter: Let Go of the Past Connect with the Present Expand the Future by Yúng Pueblo
BATB score: 3/10 🫥 *reader discretion advised* Yung Pueblo’s way of writing is like a bunch of standalone bullet points formatted in paragraphs - statements after statements thrown at you - urgh Best to: it’s like you wrote this book for yourself Best as: the premise of the whole book could have been an e-mail Best for: this book titled “lighter” actually made me feel “heavier” BATB trying to be nice: okay, I do like the short poems (but those could have been an e-card) Best


Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
BATB score: 6.6/10 🤖 *reader discretion advised* BATB is just a little bit bored of the GenAI/LLM hype 🫥 Best as: a great book about GenAI / LLM fundamentals, historical key milestones, reference cases, controversies, and future analysis 🧐 Best to: conclude the major takeaways of this book into bullet points, memorize them, own them; you are now equipped and qualified to go on a GenAI panel / discussion / keynote talk; you will looks legit - ahh what a charismatic knowledg


AIQ: How Artificial Intelligence Works and How We Can Harness Its Power For a Better World by Nick Polson and James Scott
BATB score: 7.5/10 💛 *reader discretion advised: nerd alert* Best as: the mathematics behind GenAI; “personalization” means “conditional probability” and how Netflix customization and ratings works and the equations behind them all Best for: Bayes’s Rule as an Equation: P (H | D) = [ P(H) + P(D|H) ] / P(D) ; where P is probability, H is Hypothesis, and D is Data BATB lingering thought: The prevalence of breast cancer among people like Alice is 1%. That is, for every 1,000 40


Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You by Phil Stutz
BATB score: 3/10 🏞️ Best as: 30 individual chapters making 30 unique lessons on life, betting on a 50-50 coin toss chance on whether it would make sense (be a hit) for you Best for: BATB only likes 3 chapters > Loving the One You’re With, A Model Relationship, and How to Love Yourself; the rest meh; 3/30 = 10% hit rate for BATB Best to: okie here’s the plan, go to the bookstore, find the book, shuffle to the good chapters above, read it then and there, takes less than 10 min


Stay True by Hua Hsu
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


TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson
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


Things I Should Have Said by Jamie Lynn Spears
BATB score: 1/10 😤 *reader discretion advised* just because you are someone sorta famous doesn’t mean your life is worthy of a book Best as: book title “Things I Should Have Said” excuse me, correction! “Things Not Worth Saying At All” clickbait max Best for: Jamie Lynn Spears, you wrote this book for yourself Best to: child tv star, teenage pregnancy, high school sweetheart break-up, new husband, young motherhood, daughter drowning accident, sister rivalry, back to work; fi


The Chief Executive Operating System: The Essential Playbook for Success in the CEO Role by Joel Trammell and Sherif Sakr
BATB score: 6/10 🥱 Best as: nothing more than what you already know compiled into a book with nice quotes here and there Best for: first time people manager Best to: I disagree, I believe that when you do get to be CEOs, be the CEO that is truest to who you are; no point following any framework or format; just be you, the board of directors, the company, your subordinates won’t be going to your funeral anyways Best quotes: “people don’t leave companies; they leave managers”


The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion by Dr Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne
BATB score: 7/10 🥹 Best as: a forensic psychiatrist sharing her notes from speaking to 11 inmates: serial killers, pedophiles, murderer, stalker, abuser; pleading for a chance to hold our judgement and hear them out; this book could have been a 10/10 if it was written by a writer VS a doctor (select only 5/11 stories, thriller narration, highlight the who-what) Best for: for aspirational forensic psychiatrists > 11 case studies Best to: “society needs to condemn a little les


The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
BATB score: 10/10 💯👏 *have I been living under a rock to not have come across this 1997 masterpiece? OMG* Jean-Dominique Bauby life was soaring as Editor-in-Chief of French magazine Elle. In 1995, Bauby, 43, had a stroke that resulted with locked-in syndrome where his whole body is paralyzed and he could only blink his left eyelid. His mind was 100% fully functioning but everything else is frozen. A speech therapist reads out the alphabet where Bauby would blink at the lett


The Art of Reading Minds: Understand Others to Get What You What by Henrik Fexeus
BATB score: 6/10 🫣 good stuff but needles in a haystack Best as: why your pupil dilates and why you look down when you flirt with someone you like; and how to catch a lie by only observing eye movement > doubles as a cool party trick, two truth and one lie winner forever Best for: how to catch your boyfriend cheating with just his eye movement > remembering image looks up, remembering sound looks sideways, remembering feelings looks down Best to: the most important business


The Third Door: The Mindset of Success by Alex Banayan
BATB score: 9/10 🥹 sending unsolicited emails to Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg asking for an interview may get you a hand-written rejection which is already content material 💯 Best as: diary of a 19-year-old dropout getting an exclusive interview with Maya Angelou, Bill Gates, and Lady Gaga 👏 via leveraging the “third door”connections aka persistence; never try never know The first door: the main entrance - where 99% of the people wait around hoping to get in The seco


Strategic: The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence by Rich Horwath
BATB score: 2/10 😡 omg shut up already! you know that one old leadership who kept talking, mentioning hallow frameworks, shouting some tacky quotes “differentiate or die”, dumping more business terminology and acronyms where other words would have been sufficient, feeling like he is the smartest person in the room, but it’s only shit coins he’s holding on to? Best to: a complete leadership playbook with all the frameworks you can reference to - enough for a lifetime, good fo


If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood by Gregg Olsen
BATB score: 10/10 👏 *reader discretion advised* this book is a 10/10 but it is not for the faint-hearted - definitely not for everyone; it’s sick, it’s psycho, it’s gross, it’s traumatic, BUT it’s a true story Best as: nothing that Netflix can ever make is scarier than true life itself 💀 BATB lingering thought: thank you for reminding me that this world is a scary place; people are the scariest living things Best to: Gregg Olsen is a journalist and he writes true crimes; le
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