Teaser Tuesday: You May Also Like

Like a heating pad cycling on and off, the Wheel of Time has turned ’round to Teaser Tuesday (how comforting!).

Just in case you don’t know, Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along! All you have to do is grab the book you’re currently reading, open to a random page and share a few sentences from that page. But make sure you don’t share any spoilers!*

*I wish I could take credit for this introduction, but I shamelessly stole it from Heather over at bitsnbooks. To help me make amends, you should go check out her blog.

This week I’m reading You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt. I picked this up from the library’s New Arrivals shelf because the cover looked interesting: a nice, minimalist ice cream cone.

The Goodreads’ Blurb

Everyone knows his or her favourite colour, the foods we most enjoy, and which season of The Sopranos deserves the most stars on Netflix. But what does it really mean when we like something? How do we decide what’s good? Is it something biological? What is the role of our personal experiences in shaping our tastes? And how do businesses make use of this information to develop and sell their products?

In You May Also Like, Tom Vanderbilt dives deep into this complex and fascinating world. He explores the physiology of eating to reveal how our taste buds, which can only recognize five tastes, interact with our olfactory systems and our memories to create an astounding array of flavours. He shows how difficult it is, even for experts, to pinpoint exactly what makes something good or enjoyable, and how companies like Netflix can make or lose millions based on their ability to predict what we will enjoy. Like his bestselling book Traffic, Vanderbilt’s new book takes us on a stimulating and surprising intellectual journey that helps us better understand our world and ourselves, and the things we so often take for granted.

 

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The Truly Random Number Generator sends us to page 183.

This is why things have become both flatter and spikier: In an infinite realm of choice, our choices often seem to cluster by default toward those we can see others making (or away from those we sense too many are choosing). 

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In Retrospect: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

This is the second le Carré novel I’ve read, the first being Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

I found this novel lived up to the hype: this intriguing, fast-paced thriller leaves you guessing all the way to the end.

However, I found the ending lacking and slightly improbable. I even re-read the last chapter just to be sure I’d read it correctly. It’s sad that such a good book would lose it all in the last few pages. Hm. maybe that should have been a spoiler alert.

Still, I’ll give it four stars, since I really liked it

 

What are you reading today?