Stay of Execution Book Report: 3 books

I read three books while I was away: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Blink, and Carrie Pilby. That's the order in which I read them, and also the order in which I would rank them.  I might put a bunch of empty space between Blink and Carrie P, just to express the difference in quality. 

The Dog in the Nighttime was a great narrative experiment that worked.   A quick read, a lasting impression, a glimpse at something profound, although not terribly complex. 

Blink was missing something.  Probably I was missing something.  It was a bunch of fascinating anecdotes, connected by a very tenuous thread.  I wouldn't be able to explain the unifying principle of all of the illustrative examples in a few words.  That probably means I missed the point.  It was fascinating, notwithstanding that it can't be concisely summarized.   And a lot of the ideas are now in my head, available to measure my own experience against.  But the framework to make sense of them all, and the lessons to be drawn are still a little evasive for me.

Carrie Pilby might have been an accurate and compelling portrait of a prodigiously intelligent 19 year old woman (although the details didn't ring true to me), but being in the head of such a narrator isn't all that much fun.  It was a nice book -- intelligent chick lit, I suppose -- but not very interesting to someone over 25, I would imagine.    

Next up: Quicksilver.  It's ambitious, I can say that for it already. 

Comments

[Ms. Runner]

A gold star report. I just finished Curious and Blink (in that order) and would say just the same (though probably less eloquently). I'm glad I'm not the only who thinks Blink is missing something.

[Tim]

I haven't read Blink yet, but I've heard several people who thought that the book was missing something and who had similar comments on the anecdotes and the connection between them.

[David]

I thought that you had already read Blink, Sherry. I agree, it didn't segue well. I think that what was missing was the connection between intuition and 'mind reading'. I thought he used that as an example because we all have a lot experience with observing people (been doing it a while... while we are on the subject of observation, what is your first reaction when I ask you what color yield signs are?) so should relate to it(we all think that we are experts at reading people, no). It also gave him the opportunity to show how desire can overcome intuition (thereby, giving us a yardstick to measure its strength). But the segues were week. I guess you have to guess it...

I went to a colloquium series in Cambridge in January of '99. It was this big, haughty math conclave, and everyone tossed around 'intuition' as a compliment. I was over my head in the material, but a kindly grad student from the UK helped me out and let me in on the secret. He told me what MG started his book with, when you have an expert level of familiarity with a subject, you draw good conclusions without much thought. You develop intuition. (At the time, this was a revelation for me, as I thought that intuition was divine).

[ChrisS]

Best of luck to you on Quicksilver. It left enough of an impression on me to not pick up the other mighty tomes.

[Ima Fake]

Quicksilver changed the way I look at the world. I can't stop thinking about Charles I and the beginning of the modern era.