I bought this book on my trip to China last year in February. I thought I would be able finish it on the plane. However, once I read the first chapter, I could not get used to the style of writing I realized, and therefore had been trying and failing in finish reading it.

Well, I am still not done unfortunately. But somehow once I past chapter 7, I was enjoying it more.

Those people who pick out the next trend of fashion, in this book, this ability is described as pattern recognition. Interesting and refreshing. Detail about the book summary, I’d better wait till I am done with the book.

I am half way through the book. So, wish me good luck. =) It is part of my 2006 goal of reading 25 books.

Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bund together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. [(The Tipping Point, Macolm Gladwell, page 163)]

This explains it, why some friends have different “perspectives” of what my personality is.

Interesting book that I just finished. It is a very short and easy to read fun book called “He’s just not that into you.”

More often than not we are ovewhelmed by emotions and hopes, which prevent us to see what is really going on around us. This is especially true with girls who are in love. We want to be loved, hope that the mix signals that the guys give out mean what we “want” to be, therefore we create excuses for them to pretend that they still love us.

The truth is, do they?

If they only call us when they are lonely, if they always say they are busy, if they say they are not ready to commit in a relationship yet start to date other people, what kind of signal are they giving out? Aren’t they clear enough? Why do we still waste time on these heartless guys? Because we love them more than they love us, and we want to be loved, we desperately want to be loved. How pathetic, yet how true…

Finally I am done with “Blink.” It is the first book that I finished this year. It�s one baby step towards my New Year�s Resolution of finishing 50 books. I do not know if I would be able to finish that many� I hope I don�t need to add up unfinished books as fractions towards the end.

All in all, I am glad that I am done with one book at last. Unfortunately, this book is less than satisfying for me.

I had my hope up when I first got the book, because of the nice cover design and reviews at the back. I hoped to learn something about myself from reading this book. However, I learned nothing but some fun stories. I could only take it on a very literal level, as a mere entertainment, rather than anything factual.

Yes we have rapid cognition, instincts, and ability to detect dangers around us. Yes we have unconscious working behind the scene that tell us things that we cannot even explain. Yet sometimes we make mistakes, too, because we let appearance fool us, or rely on “instincts” blindly and improperly. How can we avoid making those mistakes? The book doesn’t say…

I am a bit disappointed at this point. I hope the next book will be more interesting. Currently I have a few books in hand worth reading. A detective/mystery short story collection, a novel about a murder, another book on adaptive unconscious, or PHP� It becomes difficult to choose.

I had been reading that book “Strangers to Ourselves” by Timothy D. Wilson for a long while, ever since last year. I could never reach the end of that book for some reason.

When I was waiting in LAX this time for the China trip, I picked up a book called “Blink, the Power of Thinking without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell. I found this book interesting with a first glance. Little did I know I just bought another book about the same topic, adaptive conscious.

Of course, the approaches of these two books are quite different. “Blink” is a lighter reading. It quotes more stories, and it doesn’t use the word “adaptive conscious.” It refers it as just unconsciousness, blink, or thin-slicing. The down side of this book is that it doesn’t give you a conclusion of how to determine the good vs. bad unconsciousness. “Strangers to Ourselves” is slightly more to the scientific side. It provides more studies, psychology researches, and so on. I have yet to read the end to learn how to learn ourselves.