Saturday, November 29, 2014

29: Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

Yes, I had not read this yet. Yes, a friend gave it to me, what, seven years ago? Eight? Yes, I finally read it. It's full of two kinds of characters: terribly mean ones, and terribly naive ones. Some characters manage to combine the two characteristics.

28: Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking), Christian Rudder

Christian Rudder is one of the founders of OkCupid and was the author of the OkTrends blog. The book is, overall, fascinating and a fun read. Is it perfect? No, but I'll gladly browse it again. And I'll have to if I want to find any of the data I read about, since the organization of the material leaves something to be desired. Finding the interesting data is hard. (Like the diagram that shows straight men always prefer a 20-year old woman, while women prefer a man of their own age + 5 -- well, it shows that if you make certain probably-not-true assumptions about human behaviour and the data. Anyway. Finding this diagram? Hard.) The last few chapters (e.g., the one on "personal branding") are worthless drivel.

27: Great True Spy Stories, Allen Dulles, ed.

The WWII and Cold War stories are fascinating, but the colonial American stuff bores me to tears.