Exams are really over, in fact it has been quite some time since the final paper, though there’s still one more official A Levels examinations coming up. I have a pile of books at home, which I purchased long ago and didn’t bother to read and I decided that I probably won’t be reading them for the time being – I found more books that I want to read at this instant.
So there I was, spent more than 4 hours at Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City, deciding which books to buy. The main stuff I picked were ‘Globalization and Its Discontents‘ & ‘Making Globalization Work‘, both by Joseph E. Stiglitz, ‘The Undercover Economist‘, by Tim Harford, ‘Collapse‘, by Jared Diamond and finally, ‘New Ideas from Dead Economists‘, by Todd G. Buchholz, with a foreword by Martin Feldstein.
If you happen to be surfing Amazon, with a calculator in your hand, you’ll probably discover that the books that I listed would amount somewhere to 300 SGD and there’s no chance I can finish all those within the limited time I currently have. Yes, non-fiction books take longer to read (more thinking and re-reading of paragraphs) as compared to fictions and they cost more. This happen to be verified by my reading of ‘For One More Day’ by Mitch Albom a few days back. I finished that seemingly thick book (it has big words, I mean literally) within a matter of hours – though it cost me about the same as the non-fictions I wanted. Eventually, taking into account the stuff I want to learn and know within the short time, I decided to purchase ‘The Undercover Economist‘ and ‘Globalization and Its Discontents‘, using up a few red notes in my wallet as well as 2 pieces of $20 vouchers my junior gave me.
This reading thing is really burning holes in my pocket, maybe I should just learn to be Gnosiophobic, as [implicitly] suggested by Wensi.