Kurt's Reviews > Thinking, Fast and Slow

I should have listened to my instinct on this one. When I picked this book off the shelf at my local library I noticed that it was right next to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, a book that I read several years ago and did not enjoy at all. I can't really say why I didn't like Blink, and likewise, I can't say precisely why I did not care for this one. But, at least for me, it was unenjoyable and uninteresting enough that I stopped reading it even though I was more than halfway through.

I suspect that psychology just is not my thing -- never has been. Back in my freshman year at college many many years ago (1977 to be exact), for some reason I enrolled in a psychology class. I worked hard at it and only got a B. I always felt that the topic was just too subjective and too susceptible to spurious interpretation and manipulation or rationalization of hoped-for conclusions. And the professor himself seemed fine with grading just based on how he felt about the students and their work.

Maybe this book just brought back some unwelcome memories of that class (which was really nothing more than a nearly insignificant disappointment in what was otherwise one of the best periods of my life). Whatever the case may be, I just felt like this book was tedious, and that the few interesting points it made were too sparsely distributed, too extensively described, and of not great enough importance to make the book worth finishing.