Books books books!

One of my holiday intentions was to get as many books out of the way as fast as possible. So far I have read two and am moving on to finishing my third book, which is almost as fast as I wanted to be. From juggling playing games to watching TV shows, my inability to finish books in the desired time is based off my inability to allocate time reading rather than my inability to read quickly.

But there are many books that I need to read through, and the pleasure of knowing that I have read through them is more satisfying than the contents of the book itself, although I prioritize the significance of the content as a contribution to my knowledge rather than of the content of the book for entertainment purposes. 

So far I have read the "Life of Pi", a story of a boy named Piscine Molitor Patel who becomes lost at sea in the company of a Bengal Tiger, along the way realising the meaning of religion and his relation to God. You may know the book based on the movie released in 2012, the movie itself almost following the book word for word. Of course, for simplicity some information was modified and moments that were visually boring omitted. Nevertheless the visual contents of the movie help to visualize the contents of the story, and I highly recommend you read the book first before watching the movie, although I doubt that you will be disappointed either way. 

The next book that I read is called "Alibaba's World", which illustrates Alibaba's growth over the 15 years that it has been in existence from someone who has worked with the company from the very beginning. The more I read the book the more I am in awe of the company itself, although set up in an environment where they have an unfair advantage due to the censorship in China as my father likes to point out. Nevertheless the elements of hope and the sight of something bigger in a company is something I'd like to take from my interpretation of Jack Ma, and I hope that I see something like that as well should I go into business. I have taken a keen interest in E-commerce, whether in buying or setting up a website of my own, and only time will tell how big the impact the book will have on my life.

As the holidays continue, I will be finishing more books, and I plan to just write a little bit about them, if anything for the pure sake of recording them down in cyberspace.

Cheers,

Matthew Tan