Reading List

“Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA” by Carl Magnus Palm

In the past few months, I’ve been digging deeper into the ABBA rabbit-hole. Naturally, I had to find a good biography. ABBA’s story, among other things, is a sobering tale about the cost of fame — in their case, how it robbed them of a decent private life, and how it ravaged the marriages between the two couples in the group, as well as their relationships with their children.

This story makes you want to be careful of what you wish for. Yet, on the other hand, it also inspires you, especially in terms of how relentless ABBA was in creating great music. You can only imagine the long days and nights they dedicated in the studio to make every tiny detail sound just right. 

600 pages went by very quickly for me. The author is just the right writer to tell ABBA’s multifaceted story. This book has gone through several revisions, but I guess we can expect to get a newer edition in the future. I know I couldn’t wait to read more about ABBA’s 2021 album, Voyage — their first in 30 years — and how it even came about. 

 

 

“Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke

Easily the best novel I’ve read in a while. Right from the get-go, this book reeled me in with its vivid and immersive world. And the way in which the story gradually expanded larger and further than what I had previously imagined, continually had me wanting to know more, that I could not put the book down.  

While I’m not going to spoil the story for you, the biggest theme that I was able to get out of it is the nature of our identity, particularly how we tend to tether our identity to our beliefs, to people, and to our environment. But the reality is that our identity isn’t meant to be as fixed as we would like to believe. Our beliefs may be proven entirely wrong. People may come and go. Our environment will definitely change at least in some way.

It’s okay to attach our identity to these things. We’re only human after all. But the key is to be able to acknowledge that at any time, our identity may become obsolete. We need to be able to let go of our past selves, and be the new person that we need to be today. And to repeat this process, again and again. 

 

 

“Fried Rice” by Erica Eng

Fried Rice is a graphic novel, which tells the story of a Malaysian girl from an average middle-class family, who dreams of studying abroad and leaving behind her mundane life in Batu Pahat, Johor. But this is also a story of real life, in that not all dreams come true, and that more often than not, the things we’re really looking for are already around us. 

It’s a very simple story — in fact, I probably spoiled it already in the last paragraph. But it’s endearing, because it speaks about a truth that all of us have had to come to terms with during multiple points in our lives. Also, one of my parents is from Batu Pahat, so that might be another reason why this story resonated with me.

Another interesting thing to know is that this book won the Eisner Award for Best Webcomic. And deservedly so. If you didn’t know, it’s the most prestigious award in the comics industry, and it has been won by the likes of Alan Moore (author of Watchmen), Art Spiegelman (author of Maus), and Gerard Way (author of The Umbrella Academy). 

 

 

“This is Marketing” by Seth Godin 

Seth Godin has written an insane amount of Marketing books in the past 30 years, and they definitely played a huge role in my decision to pursue Marketing in my studies, and as a career. In this book, he distills some of his most important reflections on Marketing. 

Marketing has evolved a lot in the past few decades. There was a time when Marketing was all about advertising and hard-selling — and for the most part, it worked. But not so much anymore. In this day and age, much of the power is with the customers. As Godin explains, Marketing has become less about self-promotion, and more about finding important problems to solve. It’s about deeply understanding your customers’ needs, being honest and earning their trust, and actually making their lives better through your products or services.

 

 

“Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut

I forget how many times I’ve read this novel. Anyhow, I gave it another re-read. I personally think this is one of the most original novels by one of literature’s most original writers. It’s essentially a war story, based on Vonnegut’s experience of surviving the Dresden bombing as a prisoner-of-war. But it’s not the war story that you’d expect.

Vonnegut’s war story is built behind walls of metaphor. Rather than telling the story outright, he disguises it with sci-fi elements, like time-travel and alien abduction. On the outset, this might seem like a silly ploy. But having read this book many times, I believe it speaks volumes about the traumas of war — how Vonnegut worked over 20 years on the book and still had nothing substantial to say, how he was perpetually haunted by his memories of the war, and how he could only resort to easy answers in his struggle to make sense of what he had went through.