BATB score: 9/10 🫠 written in 1951, J. D. Salinger's book "the catcher in the rye" has been banned 9 times for being a 'bad influence' to young adult readers - excessive vulgar language (meh), sexual scenes (meh), and debatable moral issues on addictions (meh) likeas our world isn't full of these examples on a day to day the book has been linked to many real life high-profile murder cases - John Lennon's murder and President Ronald Reagan's attempted assassination - the murd

BATB score: 6/10 💰💰💰 Historical literary art piece, written in 1925 (for sure there would be a 100th year anniversary for this book), four movie adaptions include 2013 iMDb 7.2 featuring Leonardo DiCaprio Best to: have a keen curiosity of what the hype was really about for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book Best for: aren’t we all chasing richness and fame for someone to acknowledge and praise our golden accomplishments? aren’t the big mansion for hosting the big parties to show-o

BATB score: 8/10 🍋🍋🍋 Literary art at its best. Touching on the arrays of grief. Yet, the ending was extremely cliffhanger. Best to: read this in one sitting - each chapter is written through different literary styles from different POVs; narration, presentation, characters, dialogues, and plot at its best at the highest suspense (so much details like peeling an onion 🧅) Best for: Netflix would need to make a movie adaption of this urgently Best as: engaging crime suspense

BATB score: 4/10 🧍‍♀️🧍‍♂️🧍‍♀️🧍‍♂️ You either love Sally Rooney or you don’t. I don’t. I admire you that you wrote so many novel pieces at on 31 y/o. Yet, I just wasted my day reading this one of yours. Best to: the characters had explicitly detailed intercourse for roughly 8 times throughout the book; Sally Rooney is modern day Murakami - equally perverted in writing but respectfully more of female-POV “make love” Best for: 30+ years old love, lust, and friendship; a very

BATB score: 8/10 🧢 Modern day ‘Catcher in the Rye’ 🌟 Best as: literature art appreciation class required reading; it sure does sucks to always be compared to other people’s honorary literature Best for: literature enthusiast - an epistolary novel about the coming of age of a teen, great character build, touching the topics of friends, family, gender, intercourse, love, PTSD, and suicide in the most eloquent and serene manner Best to: watch the movie adaptation of “The Perks

BATB score: 1/10 It’s a bad mystery book about a ‘Virgin Mary birth’, a bad rom-com about 40s love, a bad and slow novel in general. Urgh meh. Best to: the book tried to link to two real life incidents -1955 virgin mother and 1957 Lewisham train crash; or were you trying to be a really bad historical book? Best as: nothing really, oh the book cover was of a nice design - wait a minute, the title has nothing to do with the book! Best for: nobody, just skip it Best quote: “Neve

BATB score: 7/10 🧧🥡🥢 Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s first debut novel 2022 - wow, not bad at all! Best as: a historical novel about a horrendous life of an immigrant in relation to Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 Best to: if you ever wondered where Asian hate all originated from; I loved the first 200 pages, I disliked pages 200-300, and I liked pages 300-400 - this book was so close to being a 9/10 Best for: novel enthusiast covering topics of illegal immigration, back alley brothel

BATB score: 5/10 💔 You either love it or you don’t. Best to: it’s a slow burn book about a powerful Catholic family in Nigeria vs the rest of the family Best for: novel appreciation Best as: the book’s content can be summarized in <5 minutes but it can be overly analyzed for hours; it’s about religion, revolution, corruption, discipline, coming of age, Nigeria, the author’s voice; I didn’t like it Best quotes: “We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we

BATB score: 10/10 🌷 Wow. What a classic! Definitely Amy Tan’s literary masterpiece 🌟🤩💫 Best to: prepare pen and paper to map out which grandmother, mother, daughter are related and what tragedy happened to who resulting with what in which chronological order 4 grandmothers, 4 mothers, 4 daughters, 2 granddaughters and many men in between Best as: a reminder of how we can not walk in anybody else’s shoes 👠, how each generation has their own challenges, and why miscommunic

BATB score: 8/10 👩‍❤️‍👨 likeas 9 mini-episodes of Love, Sex, and Robots on Netflix but more like 9 short novels of Love, Marriage, and Life Best to: know that the book title is an extremely poor indicator of what the book is really about; the book encompass 9 types of mature marriages and ties each of the 9 stories to Calcutta India 🇮🇳 Best as: a nice literary take on arranged marriage, affairs, divorces, lust, and falling out of love; and ending every piece on a cliffhan

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: 6/10 okay but not wow 🙄 a collection of 9 sci-fi futuristic short stories covering time travel, metaverse, global warming, digital twin, god, and prism everything everywhere all at once Best to: check out “AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future” by Chen Qiufan and Kai-Fu Lee a BATB 10/10 instead Best as: other than the first and last story that was good, the rest of the stories were very meh; the plot, the twist, the dystopia concept, the sci-fi imagination, the cha

BATB score: 4/10 👾 not a page turner Best for: honestly, good effort to write a novel about a parallel universe of game lovers, game players, and game makers Best to: the problem I have is the fact that there is so climax / highlight to this novel - like seriously, what was significant? It just went on and on, game after game after game. Or maybe ‘life’ is that way? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? With nothing significant, just day after day? Best as: if you are a critic

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: 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: 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: 7/10 🔥📚👨‍🚒 true classic piece of art, an oldie from 1953 Best to: dystopia novel - if books are illegal and if conformity without question is the norm; where firemen burn books and everyone has ADHD and is dumb Best as: a political book - censorship, no freedom for imagination, government brutal crackdowns, witch-hunt of intellectual outliers, mass tabloid groupthink Best for: 72 years later, BATB 2025 has just came across this book?! BATB lingering thought: h

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-