THE NIGHT CIRCUS * THINKING FAST AND SLOW

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - This is an unusual story about a magical dreamlike circus. To say much more about it would ruin the experience of reading the story originally and with no preconceptions. I loved everything about it....Celia and Marco and Baily and the twins and Chandresh and the look and feel of the circus. The author's narrative voice enhances the reading in such a way that when you've finished it really is as a dream. Were you there? Did it happen? What was it like? Suspend belief and read it.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - So then I went exact opposite and read a non-fiction analysis about all the ways that psychologists try to figure out how and why people think and form ideas. It's not that difficult to plow through, but it's all about measuring and labeling everything, which is mainly about keeping these guys in business. I'm a skeptic when I read statistics because the first thing I'll do is see whether the number of people who were surveyed is included in the statistic. If they try to tell me that I have some percentage of getting a disease based on a telephone sample of 2000 people, I object! How can anything about a sample of 2000 people predict anything about anything? There are millions of people in the world! To his credit, Kahneman actually addresses this. Thinking fast is when you just give an answer off the top of your head, and thinking slow is when you analyze a situation before giving an answer or reaching a conclusion. Somehow, the title doesn't completely match up to the content although he writes about it on every page. He's a good writer though, and it was interesting to read about all the different ways that psychologists test people. The doughnut test was actually used in the movie I'll review next. Read it if you enjoy non-fiction. Not if you don't.