I happened to be reading Ozan Varol's book two days ago, when I was on call looking after patients with kidney disease. As a rocket scientist turned award-winning author, Ozan Varol championed moving out of our comfort zone. That means taking off the training wheels and moving away from the familiar path.

One of my call duties was to look after and orchestrate kidney transplant from a brain death donor after a tragic traffic accident. My two patients were waiting for the new kidneys. They didn't speak

How many of us have dreamt of living better longer? I know I have.

Today, voluminous research has shown that mortality is an inevitable companion of aging and chipping away one disease at a time is futile, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic . The good news, though, is that exercise is the most potent pro-longevity "drug". I was introduced to this strategy by Peter Attia in his eye-opening book Outlive . In short, medicine's biggest failing is in attempting to treat all

For years, we love reading crime stories or psychological thrillers.

Unsettling as they're, these fictions give us irresistible pleasure from the adrenaline swooshing through the bloodstream, not to mention the Hitchcockesque entertainment of decoding mystery.

It would be easy, and oh so helpful, for authors to stick to the theme of telling lies. My daughter finished One of Us is Lying not long ago. I just read None of This is True .

All these books are destined to end with a maze twisted by the somewhat sickening knots

I doubt many outside the field of architecture have heard of Tadao Ando. Few inside the field, somehow, know that he was born in poverty, had been raised by his grandmother and was a boxer, before he started teaching himself architecture. I learrned his story from Adam Grant's book Hidden Potential .

As the only architect ever to win all four of the field's most prestigious prizes, his success has come with an asterisk. Without means to go to college, Ando borrowed architecture books from friends and

There is no one way to approach final moments with a loved one.

Ask Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and you will learn authentic language on dying. Listen to the renowned physician BJ Miller's TED Talk, and you might find out what really matters at the end of life. If you're bookworm, go and find the ones by Sherwin Bernard Nuland or Atul Gawande.

But it was only when I came across a little graphic poetry collection by Wendy MacNaughton today that I began to have deep learning on