Thursday, February 9, 2012

The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

I heard about this book from a forum that I read and thought it sounded interesting so I picked it up. Carr goes through history explaining some of the great thinkers while also explaining the development of the computer and the Internet. He does say that our attention spans in general have decreased because we are so used to skimming articles for content and clicking between tabs (Quick: how many tabs do you have open right now? I have 15 including the one being used to write this post). He states that we jump from item to item never focusing on one task long enough to be able to make sufficient progress on it. He also states that the Internet makes it harder to focus on books because of the lack of interactivity. I did find the studies about interactivity with text and comprehension of the text interesting (apparently people do worse comprehending an article with hyperlinks than they do comprehending a plain text article because they keep clicking around.

However, I was not happy that there was no real solution given in this book for the problem of decreased attention spans due to the Internet (besides avoiding it altogether--which is not really possible in today's society). I wish he would have provided ways to work around the problem.


Rating 3/5

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Open by Andre Agassi

Just finished reading Open, Andre Agassi's autobiography, and I was very impressed. His writing style made me feel like I was right next to him, whether he was hitting balls on the court, or dealing with his perfectionist father. I was surprised to learn that he really did hate tennis for quite a while, and that his trademark big hair was actually a wig. Before I read his book, I didn't know too much about him---I had watched him when he played in the late 90s through his retirement, and knew that he built a charter school, but didn't really know much about his early life and early career.

I think that the title itself speaks volumes about the book. His life is about playing tennis in the Open era, in the 4 major tournaments (Aus. Open, Wimbledon, French Open, US Open). You get a very good view of everything in his life, he shows everything---his failed early loves, his dark years of tennis, his drug use---he's putting everything out in the open for his fans to read. I'd really recommend this to anyone who is a tennis fan.

Rating: 5/5

Sunday, February 5, 2012

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

I really wasn't too fond of this book. It started out ok enough, but I was expecting more of a murder investigation instead of a girl watching her friends and family grow up without her. Many of the characters seemed flat to me, probably because we are only seeing what Susie sees instead of knowing what the actual characters think.

SPOILER ALERT:

I'm also not happy that justice is never really served for Mr. Harvey. It would have been much more satisfying for him to have been found earlier on instead of just dying by accident at the end.  About halfway through the book, I really quit caring about the characters because of their one-dimensionless.

I'm just not quite understanding why there was so much hype around this book a few years ago.



Rating 2/5 stars