Category: Psychology

The Light of the Fireflies by Paul Pen
0 stars · Book Review · Bust · Gonna Need a Stiff Drink For This One · Psychology

The Light of the Fireflies by Paul Pen

Hops&LitLeave a comment

51ZM2Qv8x5L._SY346_It’s not often I give up on a book.  And I don’t think I’ve ever given up a book in the first two chapters.  But goodness gracious, y’all.   The Light of the Fireflies is a book that I just don’t have the stomach for.  While the book excerpt leads one to believe this book is some sort of post-apocalyptic drama, it’s more of a suspenseful thriller.  Typically, I love me some good dystopia or thrillers.  However, in the first two chapters, The Light of the Fireflies jumped right into forced imprisonment, emotional abuse, and implied rape and incest.  That’s a whole lot for the first two chapters.

In addition to the emotional crap this book shoots right out the gates, there are a lot of disjointed realities presented in the first two chapters.  The world is supposedly destroyed and inhabitable.   Yet, the family has water, electricity, fresh food, crayons, colors, and even a cactus.  Where does that stuff come from?

No one has a name in this book and each person is referred to by their station in the family.  Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Grandma, The Baby.  It’s hard to empathize and connect with a bunch of nameless characters.  It’s also odd to imagine seven people existing in such close quarters without ever using one another’s names.

Every family member was supposedly disfigured by a fire before the move to the basement.  The narrator and the baby were born in the basement, so they do not have any scars and know no other way of life.  I had a hard time picturing an event in which every family member was burned and disfigured without any details or explanation from the author.

The final straw for me was the fact that the entire plot centered around one character not knowing anything and everyone else knowing everything.  Even after two chapters, it was obvious this was a book of waiting it out and following crumbs throughout each chapter to piece together the story.  I absolutely hate when entire plots are written around a single character (or in this case a group of characters) who knows everything and the reader and/or main character are left to fit the pieces together.

Yes, I know many mysteries and dystopian books utilize this method.  However, in The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game and The Maze Runner, someone else knowing what is going on is part of the surprise of those books.  The same is true for most mysteries.  Gone Girl definitely utilized this method, but that book was VERY well done and the reader watched the story unfold from the knowing person’s point of view, which is what made it such a fantastic read.

0 stars for this book.

Until next time, happy reading and cheers!

 

Advertisement
Bust · Psychology · Science · thoughts

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People Borrow by Mahzarin R. Banaji

Hops&LitLeave a comment

Blindspot ended up in my Kindle cue after I took a course in “unconscious bias” at work.  The course was incredibly interesting and through a few exercises, I discovered that I one of my unconscious biases was “Tall people have bad balance”.  Looking back, I have no idea why I think/thought tall people had bad balance, but it was something applied to every tall person encountered, regardless of whether or not I’d seen them demonstrate poor balance.

Digging deeper, I’m sure we all have biases we can’t explain and Blindspot promised to be a good excavation tool into understanding the hows and whys of those unconscious biases.  Based on the expectation that this book would provide the psychology or explanation behind bias, the true content of Blindspot ended up as a bit of a surprise.

First off, it read more like a long article than a book, with the purpose of each chapter to explain the experiments and results the authors achieved when testing subjects for various unconscious biases.

Secondly, I was very wary of what felt like finite conclusions reached by the authors that they were bias this way or that way, or that subjects maintained particular biases when the later chapters demonstrated that positive exposure prior to the experiments significantly impacted the results of the bias.

Leading into this, it was incredibly unsettling to read elsewhere that some employers were actually using experiments similar to those in Blindspot to vet potential employees for hire-ability.  For one thing, the experiments only measured a preference or an association of X against Y, without any way to account for “real life conditions” like previous experience, context, location, morals, upbringing, and personal values.

If anything, Blindspot was eye-opening in just how much previous experience can alter the bias, leading me to conclude that while we all have biases, they can change over time and experience.  It was also interesting to note that we didn’t have to actually be being attention to the experience of something (like a commercial or magazine ad) for it to imprint in our brains.  This led to an internet rabbit hole of research down the path of marketing tactics and how they are used to influence us to feel and buy.  While I wasn’t overly bowled over by Blindspot, kudos to them for providing a pathway into interesting conversation topics on social engineering.

Until next time, happy reading friends!

-R