Freakonomics

Freakonomics it is.

I started it the same day I finished Northanger Abbey.  My first impression was that the authors seemed rather chuffed with themselves.  In hindsight, I suppose that was warranted, but it isn't very appealing (and a few chapters in, that impression lingers).  I do think it's an interesting book, although I suspect that it would have elicited a few more moments of shock and awe if I had read it when it first came out; at this point, most of the big revelations have become, if not common knowledge, at least more common than they were 7 years ago.

A couple of other observations:

1. The editing isn't stellar.  It's not terrible, but I'm noticing and remembering a few mistakes along the way.
2. There are end notes.  Personally, I prefer footnotes.  I like to have supplementary information or citation information right there, because if it's at the end, I either don't know that I should be looking for it, or I'm constantly flipping the pages back and forth, which makes me kind of nuts.  Again, this is a personal preference, but it's really bugging me.
3. I'm not a huge fan of the way the book is structured.  Specifically, there are some revelations in the introduction or early chapters (the things that come to mind are the correlation between plummeting crime rates and Roe v. Wade and the way that real estate agents sell other people's homes vs. how they sell their own) that they then try to use as cliff-hangers or big revelations later on...it just doesn't work.  At the end of the chapter about crack dealers (probably the most interesting chapter thus far), they talk about how even though a lot of analysts thought violent crime would continue to rise at a furious rate, all of a sudden it dropped off.  They treat it like a cliff-hanger, but if you, like me, tend to read books from beginning to end, you already know why.  They talked about it in the introduction!  

Anyway, I feel like I'm being really negative about this book.  I don't mean to be.  But the most lasting impressions I'm getting from this book are those listed above.

Admittedly, I just finished the chapter about crack dealers and I walked over to the computer and immediately began writing this - there's a good chance my frustration will fade quickly.  But that was always the point of this blog - when you're reading, there are things you are excited about or frustrated with or just generally overbrimming with opinions on, and you want to share those thoughts right in the moment, right when you're thinking them, because if you don't (if you're me, at least), you lose them.  And in a perfect world, you want to share them with someone else who just finished that part in the book too (or, in lieu of a perfect world, I guess you share them with your blog and hope that someone else will stumble upon that particular thought when they particularly need it).