Posted by contrarian23 on 8/4/2015 9:12:00 PM (view original):
Posted by Midge on 8/4/2015 4:49:00 PM (view original):
Has anyone read any of Malcolm Gladwell's books?
They're OK, not great. Gladwell is an engaging writer, but he tends to grasp onto one idea and apply it excessively, in my opinion. I like Michael Lewis much more.
Malcolm Gladwell's always annoyed me, and he's one of the reasons I finally stopped renewing my
New Yorker subscription (not that he's the worst writer they publish: there's also David Brooks and Lena Dunham, among others).
Anyway, here's a decent overview of Gladwell criticism, with plenty of links:
www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php
Some vacation reading I've done recently:
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I'd attempted to read James before, but never got more than 10 pages in. Someone told me this was his most readable novel (novella, really), and maybe that's true, since I managed to finish it. But I don't think I'll ever be sophisticated enough to appreciate sentences like this:
"To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism of preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgement and, so far as might be, my agitation."
That's a typical sentence for this book, by the way, chosen pretty much at random. If you like it, go read the book. It's full of that sort of stuff.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is another 19th century novella, a lot more readable than the above, and hard to classify. The narrator's a paranoid, misanthropic kook who also happens to be hilarious and occasionally brilliant in mocking everything around him.