A book is rarely
just a book.

It leads you somewhere.

An experiment by Dr Hsin-Ning Yong

01 / HOW I GOT HERE

I have always read.

But for a long time, I mostly read what I thought would be useful. When I started teaching, that meant books on business innovation, entrepreneurship and managing change.

The more I read, the more curious I became about things outside what I teach.

I started following leads. A citation in a book. Something mentioned in a podcast. A student’s reflection I was grading. A recommendation from a friend.

These led me to books that would never normally have appeared on my radar.

And then something interesting happened.

The books started leading me elsewhere.

One inspired me to write my first book. Another eventually sent me to a place I had never been.

Things became other things.

Where else can a book lead you?

That is what I want to explore with Kismet Reads.

02 / AN AFTERNOON AT THE MUSEUM

Books laid out across the tables at The Library of Unread Books

I chanced upon The Library of Unread Books at the Singapore Art Museum.

I sat between the tables, picking up whatever happened to be on my left and right. During the one and a half hours I was there, I read short stories, poetry, Chinese children’s stories and fiction. Quite a few of them were books I would never have come across if I had not been sitting there, surrounded by all these random books.

I found the experience strangely cathartic.

Partly because my world suddenly became a little wider through these chance encounters.

And partly because the experience was random. That feels increasingly rare these days, when so much of what we see is served to us based on what we already like.

Afterwards, I started thinking about the books that had entered my own life in unexpected ways.

Some were memorable simply because of how I met them.

Others opened trails I could never have predicted.

Those are the stories I want to collect in Kismet Reads.

ONE OF THE BOOKS HAD SOME ADVICE FOR ME.

to get a life