Reading – 2024

Books here are only listed if I’ve completed them; recommended titles are in bold.

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A Handful of Dust
Disney U
Exit Interview
Book Lovers
Boundless
The Measure
Endless Night
Parable of the Sower
The Woman in Me 

Parable of the Talents
Fast Like a Girl
Stay True
Poverty, by America

Paved Paradise
The Consolation of Philosophy
How to Practise
FantasticLand
How We Live Now
The Poppy War
The Dragon Republic
Nature Noir
Fluke
To the Letter
The Snakehead
Dinner on Monster Island
To Paradise
Griffin & Sabine
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (reread)
Nothing to Envy
The Long Walk
Dune
Compass

The Return of the King
Dune Messiah
The Surgeon (Rizzoli & Isles No. 1)
I Meant It Once
Anything You Want
Binocular Vision
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Apprentice (Rizzoli & Isles No. 2)
If I Were King of Singapore

Total: 41 books; 23 fiction

A more balanced reading habit this year – I usually have more non-fiction reads in a year.

The year started well: The Measure and the Octavia E Butler books were very good. The Parable series was so eerily realistic. And so was FantasticLand – I was in disbelief that it was fiction even though S, who recommended me the book, had made it very clear. My sister was a source of good books and I enjoyed RF Kuang quite a lot. The Handmaid’s Tale was also a gripping read, and I am glad my sister got me the book. If not, looking at my very-long to-read list, who knows when I will get to it. The Rizzoli & Isles series was a recommendation from a friend, and it reminded me of Criminal Minds. The writing can be better, but the plot moves along so well, we got hooked. Who knows why I picked up Dune and endured the made-up words but it was an eye-opener, and the second book was a breeze after the first.

And perhaps it is age but I have done my first re-read (that I can remember). I re-read Italo Calvino’s IOAWNAT and reminisced a little about the version of myself who first read the book 20 years ago. It was a gift from a supervisor. Perhaps this is the year of appreciating reading recommendations.

📺 🎵 Some things I’ve watched and listened to – 2024

Hell’s Kitchen
Singles Inferno, Season 3
Celebrity Jeopardy
The Floor
Man on the Run (2023)
Criminal Minds, Evolution
The Bear
The Brothers Sun
Shark Tank
Next Level Kitchen
Spartan Team
Friends (reruns)
Eras Tour (movie)
Win the Wilderness
King Richard (movie)
Physical 100, Season 2
Selling Sunset, Season 7
The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon (movie)
Three Body Problem
Abang Adik (movie)
Aquaman 2 (movie)
American Pickers
The Lion King (2019) (movie)
The Super Mario Bros (movie)
The Office (US series)
The 8 Show
Dancing with the Devil
MH 370: The Plane that Disappeared
Curious Pedals, Cycling from Finland to Singapore
Chao Yue (2021) (movie)
Eternal Summer (2006) (movie)
Dark Side of the 2000s
Masterchef
Running Man (China)
The Goldfinger (2023) (movie)
Before Sunset (movie)
Roger Federer: 12 Days
Sprint: The World’s Fastest Humans
Dr Jason Leong – Hashtag Blessed
Double
Bridgerton, Season 3
YOLO (2024) (movie)
Boyfriend
Chinese Idol: Our Song, season 1
Pop Star Academy
Love is Blind, UK
Grand Maison Tokyo
Unnatural Death Investigation
Good Luck!
Culinary Class Wars
Dune (movie)
Fisk
Born for the Spotlight
Unfrosted (movie)
Trunk
Happy Together (movie)
The Dreamers (movie)
Disclaimer
Squid Game 2
Return to Reason (2023) (movie)

//

(Listing only artists/ albums new to me)

Mildlife, Chorus
Arvo Part
Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department
Liu Yu Ning
Fujii Kaze
Warmth, Claroscuro
Bon Iver, Sable
Ray LaMontagne, Long Way Home
Maribou State, Ninja Tunes Presents; Portraits Outtakes
The Cure, Songs of a Lost World
Jack Ladder, Hurtsville
Daniel Avery & Alessandro Cortini, Illusion of Time

//

Plus:
Taylor Swift, Eras Tour (Live, in Tokyo)
The Pen Addict – podcasts; Twitch streams
Dear Evan Hansen (Pangdemonium)

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Recommended titles in bold. Watching Japanese shows reminded me of the earlier years of being together with the other half. There were so many of those then, and quite a number of good ones. Nostalgia wise, 2024 brought a new album by The Cure. It is great and the lead singer sounds the same as he was. Unbelievable.

We did not make it to the movies in person at all. But I did manage to watch more movies this year, at home and on the plane. I even poked around Mubi and looked through my old watchlist.

Links from the past weeks

Links from the past weeks

  • Apple as a boomer. Well, it is now a services company. And speaking of boomer, Reeder released a new app and I tried it for a while. Eventually I chose to keep to the classic Reeder. I am a creature of habit.



  • The fountain pen market seems to be very lively these days. Special releases galore, and this store special of a Vanishing Point looks delicious.



  • I keep hearing things about limiting the maximum your phone charges to, and I don’t see the point of artificially limiting your battery for a benefit that may or may not be shown to be true. Some people have run some of their own experiments.



  • What is the philosophy of Dune?

    I have not seen the movies, and I decided I will give the books a go. It is really fascinating, once you get past the made-up words, and the way the narration keeps changing between characters and the characters’ respective inner monologues.



  • An unprecedented level of drama in the fountain pen community resulted in this megathread that has some 3,000+ comments.


    Only time will tell whether the right judgment was passed, but for me, I have decided that there was no need to give this business any more of my business.



  • Methods of solving Japanese crosswords


    The Japanese call them nonograms, and I chanced across the puzzle book at Daiso. I was hooked, and they allowed me to make good use of my pencil collection.



  • The Last Tea Shop


    I was watching Brad Dowdy play one of those “journalling solo RPG things”, and decided to give this a go myself. Really fun.



  • Plonk It


    A really cute name for a guide to the very fun geoguessr game. Yes, I have been playing too many games lately.



  • Chimbridge Singlish Dictionary


    The site has a decent URL but the name of the site is a winner.



Links from the past weeks

Links from the past weeks

  • I went down a Tsai Ming-liang rabbit hole, and found this guide to his movies. The page is awesome.



  • I was watching The 8 Show and learned the term “limousine liberal”. It is not new but I have not heard of it before. It calls out the hypocrisy of liberals of upper classes, who are insulated from the consequences of the programs/ principles they are peddling.



  • When something hits Coffeezilla’s radar, you know it is gonna be good fun. This AI company’s latest product was also called “barely reviewable” by Marques Brownlee, and while I was skeptical of the advancements, the videos by MKBHD and Coffeezilla made me pay a little more attention.



  • The pigeon problem in my neighbourhood has finally come too close for my liking. I had to look up homemade bird repellants.



  • This Atlantic piece, titled The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop, came to my attention as I was pondering having carry-on only when I travel within the US. (I have little to no faith that the American domestic flight system would always work out in my favour. With the traffic involved, it is only a matter of time before one becomes part of the statistics pertaining to lost or delayed luggage.)


    That said, it might well be true that if everyone just checked in their luggage, the flight experience would be much enhanced.



  • Shows like this are sometimes a little hard to watch because of the cringe-inducing characters, but for the sheer train-wreck potential, I spend some time watching Super Rich in Korea. Yong is from Singapore and claims to be top 1% of Singapore’s rich (which isn’t that rich so maybe he was aiming for accuracy, good job). He is so awkward that you begin to feel for him.


    Yes, I suppose only a certain type would agree to go on a TV show, and well, the man did get a piece on Singapore’s broadsheet focused entirely on him.


    PS. In the next month, Yong gets another piece focused on him. He might have done better for himself if he had chosen to not engage the journalist for this second piece.



📖 The Measure

“Can you tell what this one means?” Nina pointed to another sticker. Maura studied the yellow paper under Nina’s finger. Se il per sempre non esiste lo inventeremo noi. Her forehead scrunched, her brain searching for the words. “If forever doesn’t exist,” she said, “we’ll invent it ourselves.”

―
Nikki Erlick
The Measure

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This is a very captivating thought experiment disguised as a science fiction novel. I gobbled it up very quickly on a flight. The story begins with everyone waking up one day to find a box at their doorstep, and inside that box is a piece of string. The length of the string corresponds to how long you will live.

If you have a short string, do you give up? Take all the risks you want before you are gone? Consider euthanasia to avoid a nasty accident taking your life? Should your leaders declare the length of their strings? What if you and your life partner have markedly different lengths… The writer explores many, many different scenarios and they can be intimate, horrifying, banal… I didn’t have much expectations in terms of writing but I found that the story moves along well, and much as the topic is morbid, the book is overall leaning towards optimism. It would perhaps be more appreciated by those who like reading philosophy.

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“The beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle has always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.”

Links from the past weeks

  • I found old notes I made, and I had copied a part of T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton on a piece of foolscap paper. I guess that was an early version of a commonplace book. I duly copied the text into my current system. And of course, I had to go read What “Into the Rose Garden” Means.



  • Reading Compass is a true exercise of the mind. I enjoy reading it but have to take breaks from it. Mathias Énard is quite an interesting character but mostly because the world he inhabits is so foreign to me. I first saw the book in the UK a few years ago, and finally got down to getting myself a copy. I contemplated reading it on the library app, but this is the kind of book that has to be read in hard copy form.



  • Six Famous Notebook Users



  • Apparently the concept of wind phones is not new, but I just read about one on Whigbey Island.

    The desire to speak to those who have departed is not an uncommon one (though I personally do not have it), and I guess there is just something about speaking into a receiver.



  • It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight, study suggests.
    But if time-restricted eating helps you to cut calories, it works!



  • I sometimes wonder if I am half a naturalist. I cannot be that much of one because I live in a concrete jungle sometimes masquerading as a garden city. But every once in a while, books on the natural world catch my eye.



  • On having no visual memory

    I do not see images in my head. And reading about it felt so gratifying. It feels like oversharing if I tell someone about it, but I have been wanting to find someone else I know who is also this way. [The story behind how the condition came to have a name is an amusing one.]



  • Behold, a commonplace book in the form of a website.



Driving in Seattle

It was my first time driving on the other side of the road. And so I had to be extra careful. I didn’t have any real issue, and this, I believe, is largely due to the graciousness of those who were driving around me. Some observations:

  • Right lane line should align with centre of car. Back home, I had gotten very used to my car and hardly give any thought to this. But in Seattle, the rental company issued me a car much wider than I am used to.
  • Turning right on red – did it for the first time!
  • I had read about the middle island for turning vehicles but had to overcome the idea that I can drive onto an area marked by yellow lines.
  • Nobody horned (at me) and motorists waited until they could safely overtake me.
  • People tend to give way once you signal – in crawling traffic, I could make it to the HOV lane quite easily.
  • People drive at speed limit on the slowest lane of the freeway. That would be a marvel in my country, where the speed differential from the fastest to the faster to the slowest lane can vary quite a bit.
  • The entry lane of the freeway merges with the slowest lane on the freeway – so when I am on the slowest lane, I need to watch out and give way to entering vehicles.
  • How to behave at uncontrolled intersection was another matter I was curious about. It was quite easy – each driver goes in turn, depending on who reaches the stop line at that intersection first. Frankly easier than what happens in my home country – you are supposed to give way to your right but many a time, it is a matter of who is more daring.
  • Went around a roundabout. It was in a quiet neighbourhood and so narrow! And it goes counter-clockwise.

Everything is amusing when it is new/ flipped from what you are used to. I was happy that I managed to come out of this unscathed. Haha.

Links from the past weeks

  • We Shouldn’t Have Let Ryan Adams Cover Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’
    I loved the album. I wasn’t a fan of either artist then, but the album suited my mood in 2015/ 2016. Since then, Adams has faced a reckoning of sorts and I have stopped listening to the album. Given Taylor Swift’s success today, it seemed hilarious to read that it took Adams covering Swift for her to be taken seriously. I say “seemed” because it should not be that way. It is not funny.



  • Sometimes I read a random blog post off my RSS reader, and then install a new browser. It is 2024; who needs a new browser?



  • Bring back cubicles!
    Everything is relative. (I would ask for the return of a room with a window, fuck you very much.)



  • Kokuyo Fine Writer
    Something I picked up at the Haneda airport, and could not find anything on it, until I searched YouTube and found Japanese vloggers showing off their new loot (with this link in the video description).



  • I loved Stay True by Hua Hsu, and admired the writing, the photographs, the fact that he kept old letters/ faxes. Here’s a profile on the man.



  • Reading Octavia E Butler led me down the path towards process theology. I am a bit late to the game because her books apparently hit bestseller lists in the thick of the pandemic. It is eerie, to me living presently in 2024, how a book written 30 years ago and set in 2024, predicted so many things so well. God is change.



  • A notecard system as your commonplace book. I had a stack of index cards lying around (because I used to have a hipster PDA), ahem, and so I now have a commonplace book in the form of index cards.



  • Lessons from the last Swiss finishing school
    Such a good read. Seems like a rich-person’s version of a hobby, vs. me thinking about having drum lessons.