The Black Swan

From the beginning, I could tell this book was going to be tough going.  I’ve read several similar books attacking conventional wisdom, including Freakonomics (right before starting this project) and Wrong (reviewed here).  Of the three, this book was by far the least conversational and most intellectual (ie most difficult to read!).    The book took a lot of time to make a few simple points.  There were also many chapters that started with anecdotes not clearly related to the subject of the book.  This gives the disorienting sensation of having walked into a room and realizing you don’t remember why you decided to head to that room in the first place!

It’s Got Character

I really enjoyed the way The Man Who Loved Books Too Much was written.  The author’s style was very conversational and she did a nice job of blending descriptions of her own experience with those of her two “main characters” the book dealer/detective and the thief.  I really enjoyed her attempts to understand why so many people love and collect rare books, including dabbling in collecting herself.  As she concludes, a lot of people build an identity out of the books they collect.  For that reason, I very much enjoyed her descriptions of the collectors she met, the sort of books they collected and the the reasons for their collections.    The book was definitely less of a thriller or a mystery than I though it might be, but there were a few moments of tense anticipation and certainly lots of curiosity about what might happen next.  As Erik Larson said in his own review, it really was “the author’s cozy, quiet style” which kept me turning the pages on this one.  I felt like a friend was relating a story to me.

001 – The First Book!

One book down, only about 998 to go!  Wrong – Why Experts Keep Failing Us And How To Know When Not To Trust Them was a really interesting a read, a good start to the project 🙂  What shocked me most in the book was the finding that 2 in 3 high-end research papers are later refuted by other papers!  As someone who will probably cite other scientists work a lot and perhaps pursue time-consuming projects based on this work, I found this kind of terrifying.