Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

By far this is the best of the three Malcolm Gladwell books I have read (see The Tipping Point and Blink). I read this while on the vacation I mentioned last week. I actually read the entire book in a day. What can I say...we were at the beach. I don't think I've ever done this before, but I am going to recite the back of the book as it perfectly describes the book (fair use):

In understanding successful people, we have come to focus far too much on their intelligence and ambition and personality traits. Instead, Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, we should look at the world that surrounds the successful - their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way, Gladwell reveals what the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common, the reason you've never heard of the smartest man in the world, why almost no star hockey players are born in the fall, and why, when it comes to plane crashes, where the pilots are born matters as much as how well they are trained.

I found the book to be extremely insightful. Maybe smarter people have already heard about some of the examples in the book. Obviously everyone has heard of the Beatles and Bill Gates, but do you know their background? Understanding what they went through and where they came from makes you realize success was inevitable.

I thought the second half of the book could be misconstrued as stereotyping or racist. The author makes a lot of statements about different cultures and races, but a lot of what he said was simply pointing out facts and making connections. I didn't find any of it offensive. In fact, I thought it provided a great segway to the conclusion of the book. The final chapter tied together the whole book together (not the chapter about his mom, but the chapter about KIPP).

Almost positive this will end up on my top 5 at the end of the year. I cannot wait to read Malcolm Gladwell's next book, David and Goliath, due out October 1st of this year.

My rating for Outliers: 5 stars out of 5. Get it here!

P.S. At some point, I'm going to make a list of my favorite authors. Malcolm Gladwell would definitely be on the list. This goes back to the question I posed last week...should I blog random topics when I don't have a book to review?

P.S.S I've added an "Upcoming Releases" page, which you can access by clicking the link on the right side of the page. Basically keeping track of upcoming books so I don't forget!

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Five days of vacation with family equals a ton of reading time. A ton. As in three books in five days. What can I say. I like to read. So I'm spending my Sunday night writing three posts, one of which will be revealed as soon as I'm done. I'm saving the other two for the following two Sundays (but I'll spare the suspense - I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Insurgent by Veronica Roth).

I received Hosseini's first book, The Kite Runner, as a secret Santa gift a few years ago. I was glad I got it, because I knew it was a good book but I had yet to read it. I ended up really liking the book. Before the vacation, I stopped at Barnes and Noble and decided to pick up Hosseini's most recent book, And the Mountains Echoed.

The story spans a lifetime. Literally. It starts with a brother and sister in Afghanistan. They live in a very poor village. When the brother is ten and the sister is three, the father decides to give up his daughter to a wealthier family. From there, the book goes on about all the people who came in and out of the brother's and sister's lives. They are reunited at the end of their lives as their health is deteriorating (sorry for the spoiler, but it's really obvious that's the ending).

The storytelling is great. This author may be one of the best at telling stories. But the book dragged on as more characters were brought into the story. We dive into obscure characters' lives for no apparent reason. I got bored with it. I finished it only because I was curious how all these random people's lives intersected. Unfortunately, the ending didn't make up for me fighting to the end.

My rating for And The Mountains Echoed: 2 stars out of 5. Get it here!

Quick Side Story: I was in Saratoga this weekend, and the hotel I stayed had a "Read & Return" library. You could take a book and return it whenever you stayed at another one of their hotels. I love ideas like this. My only complaint is many of the books were old and not very popular. More current books in the circulation would make something like this very popular.

Question...should I make stories like these separate posts? Like when I haven't finished reading a book for a Sunday post. I have a few other musings I could write about.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

A friend asked me my opinion of Gone Girl. While I had heard of the book, I didn't have any interest in reading it. But since she asked, I decided I'd give it a go. My course of action was to take a bite - read the first few chapters - and if I liked it, I'd finish it. Not going to lead you on...I only took a bite.

The plot itself is neat. A husband and wife move back to Missouri after losing their jobs in New York City. They are celebrating their five year anniversary when something goes terribly wrong. While Nick (the husband) goes to work, Amy (the wife) disappears. The house is shaken up and clearly she didn't leave on her own. Nick reports her missing to the police, but he lies often and doesn't appear to be a grief-stricken husband. Could he be a killer?

After reading the first 75 pages, it wasn't for me. Here's why. I wanted to find out what happened to Amy. I did. The style was cool, too. The story happens in real time from Nick's perspective. At the same time, we get to read Amy's old diary entries. But I couldn't bear to read the author's writing. I thought it was terrible. Amazon declared her "one of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time". Maybe for coming up with good plots. It can't possibly be for her writing. On one of the first pages, I counted a sentence with 12 commas. They were all used to separate phrases. The sentence was truly a paragraph. There was so many adjectives I found it hard to read. It's as if she was trying too hard. It's unfortunate that this takes away from a solid plot.

My rating for Gone Girl: Did not finish. Get it here.

P.S. Back to back weeks with the main character being named Nick. Is there another book I could read with the main character named Nick?