I’ve been looking forward to reading “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell since I pulled it, and a couple of its brothers, out of my friend’s personal library redistribution project back in December. I redistributed those babies directly to the top of my TBR pile! If you’re curious, I wrote a bit about that adventure at the beginning of January, “What Did My Book Blog Accomplish in 2020?”
The first book I read by Malcolm Gladwell was “Talking to Strangers” and it was far more than I expected the book to be. “Enlightening” doesn’t begin to explain it. He writes about complicated human behavior in a way that makes you feel like you’re discovering it yourself. You know you’re being led somewhere, but you don’t know where. When you begin to arrive, you feel like you’re the smartest kid for finding it. And at the end of the book, you’ve incorporated what he’s said into your thinking without feeling like you were hit over the head and dragged there.
The subtitle to this one is, “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” It looks into all those snap judgements that we make, why we make them, and how can we harness that understanding. Those unconscious decisions we make so many times a day aren’t useless!
I’m only a chapter in this morning and I’m already thinking, “Whoa…THAT’S what’s happening!” It’s already confirming a few things for me, like why it was a good idea for me to stop watching the news and leave social media. It’s made me think about how I get my best writing done. And made me begin to rethink a few things that I’ve taken for granted.
“All that from the first 80 pages, Michelle? Really?”
Yes! He sets things up in an amazing way, expands on them over the bulk of the book, and then brings them all together in fascinating and useful way at the end. Like the Stephen King of psychology books!
Intrigued? You know you are! You can read more about Malcolm Gladwell and his books at his website. And if you decide to read the book, leave me a comment! As usual, I’ll be posting some quotes from the book along with my thoughts in the coming weeks. Be sure to subscribe to get them!
[…] is the third Malcolm Gladwell book I’ve read. The first two were Talking With Strangers and Blink. Both ended up being an entirely different book than I thought they were going to be, and in the […]