The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga; "A chauffeur in India relates the story of his transformation from manservant to entrepreneur to murderer; the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize"How We Decide - Jonah Lehrer; "We tend to believe we buy books for rational reasons, because we want to know about Topic X or because it got an excellent review. But it's also done in response to all sorts of emotional cues, including the cover, the types of books it's next to, the tone of the acknowledgements. For example, I once had to buy all these Calvino paperbacks just because I loved the way the spines looked on my shelf."
Huh, that's exactly the same way I buy comic book trade paperbacks.
"For a book that plumbs the mysteries of the emotional brain, it has almost nothing to say about the decisions that most of us would conventionally describe as 'emotional.' We hear about aviation heroism and poker strategies, and we hear numerous acoounts of buying consumer goods. But there's barely a mention of a whole class of choices that are suffused with emotion: whether to break up with a long-standing partner, or to scold a disobedient child, or to let an old friend know that you feel betrayed by something he's said. For most of us, I suspect, these are the decisions that matter the most in our lives, and yet How We Decide is strangely silent about them. (Steven Johnson, The New York Times Book Review, March 22, 2009)
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