1066 people claim they go to a website and type in the current page number of their reading progress so they don’t lose their place.
“I’m just in a real mood to buy a book.”
“I collect autographs, that’s my hobby. I don’t judge you for all them books you read.”
“I was gonna get it on Kindle, but then people couldn’t see how deep I am.”
“Green Eggs, implausible… and Ham? Elitist!”
“New York Jewocracy telling the country man how to eat his own breakfast.”
“The MIT Science Fiction Society’s official review of “Twilight” book.”
The item descriptions are sometimes great like
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen The list author says:
“Just kidding. This would almost fer sure get him beat up by “the mexicans.”“
or
Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Calla Editions) by Edgar Allan Poe The list author says: “a lot of people read these stories in highschool but my brother mostly smoked pot in highschool…”
A look at reasons for personal taste
And brain science has shown how musical pleasure is structured by expectation and familiarity, in a particular song (when will the pattern resolve, and how?), between songs (is this music like other music we know and like?) and between genres (do you know the rules of this kind of music?). Balancing repetition and novelty is crucial: some songs feel too complicated to enjoy and others too cliched to hold interest. There’s little explanation, though, of why people gravitate toward different ratios of surprise to familiarity. […]
There’s a network of neurons in the brain stem specifically geared to sort unfamiliar sounds into patterns. When they succeed, the brain releases a dose of pleasure-giving dopamine; when they fail, when a sound is too new, excess dopamine squirts out, disorienting and upsetting us. […]
Still, the field is young. I wouldn’t be surprised if variances in individual brain chemistry help explain taste predilections: if Celine [Dion] fans and I disagree on whether her music is fresh, maybe my brain is a bigger dopamine junkie.
- Carl Wilson
Let’s Talk About Love (A Journey to the End of Taste) pp. 77-78
Do you like short stories? Etgar Keret is an Israeli author who writes extremely short (1-3 pages) slice of life stories. Some are magical realism others are just momentary character glimpses. The end of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God has a long story that was turned into the film Wristcutters: A Love Story which was also excellent.
If you have a short attention span or a limited amount of reading time, this book and his other two (The Girl on the Fridge and The Nimrod Flipout) are perfect.
