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My 2025 Reading Round-up – 42 books and 53 links
This is a summary of recommendations from my book and online reading in 2025, alongside a few bonus reflections.
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Paris is for lovers, Beijing is for bureaucrats. Kuala Lumpur is for… cars?
In just one hour, a Londoner can ride the Tube/Underground and cover 2.6 times the area a Kuala Lumpur commuter can. If you’re in Madrid or Tokyo, your coverage is roughly double. Until the MRT3 Circle Line is ready, woe is us.
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Reading A Pattern Language: “1. Independent Regions” or the cultural spheres of “crummy” New Yorkers
Bouncing around the world from New York to Silicon Valley, ancient Greece, Penang, India, Japan, Turkey, France, Manchester, and back again to New York.
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More On Suffering in Bosnia, Biafra, Bangladesh – Ramanujan’s riff
This poem by A.K. Ramanujan completes a literary triptych to my previous post on poems on suffering by W.H. Auden and Jack Gilbert.
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“About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters”
Cognitive dissonance and/or hypocrisy? Seeking answers from W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense” in a time of global conflict and tension.
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Reading Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language”: Introduction
Note: This is the first post in a series of layperson reflections on the book, “A Pattern Language”. Each post will focus on one chapter/pattern, Piet Mondrian’s unfinished, last piece, “Victory Boogie Woogie” and his other similar works were supposedly influenced by the streets and avenues forming the Manhattan city grid. Individual rectangles and squares…
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“Computer says ethnicity?”: A preliminary exploration of how Malaysians vote using Machine Learning
Can machine learning predict the winner of an election? Which is a more important factor in how Malaysians vote: ethnicity or urbanisation?
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Creating an economic atlas of Malaysia: A work-in-progress preview
Five pages of a work-in-progress economic atlas of Malaysia, created for a university assignment. 1. A macroeconomic overview. 2. Malaysia’s colonial past. 3. Socioeconomic indicators. 4. The palm oil industry and environmental impacts. 5. A hub in the global semiconductor supply chain.
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Joel Goh
Perfect is the enemy of done. Exercises in shipping.
Joel Goh 