Week 6

I finished reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell this week. The most interesting thing I read about this week was the epidemic of teen smoking. Gladwell noted that the rate of teen smoking has been rising despite the fact that the prices of cigarettes have been raised and the laws regarding selling cigarettes to minors have been tightened. Also, Gladwell pointed out that the efforts to educate teens about the dangers of smoking have failed. In fact, Gladwell argued that most smokers tend to overestimate the potential risks of smoking. A study by a Harvard economist found that smokers tend to guess that smoking takes nine years off a person's life. In reality, the true answer in somewhere between six and seven years.

The lesson that Gladwell wants his readers to understand is that the fight to reduce teen smoking should not be given up; instead, the strategy to reduce teen smoking should be changed. Gladwell argued that researchers and scientists should look to find a way to lower the nicotine level in cigarettes so that teens do not get the same buzz or high from their first few cigarettes that causes them to move from being recreational smokers to addicted smokers. This is the sort of "outside the box" thinking that draws me to Gladwell's writing. Although I did not enjoy "The Tipping Point" quite as much as "Outliers", I still want to read more of Gladwell's writing.

Thinking about what sort of writing style interests me brings me to another idea I want to talk about. I'm not sure about other people, but I can often tell if I will like a book or not by the time I finish reading the first paragraph or page. This experience was especially true for me at one point in high school. I checked out a book from our library and I was excited to start reading it. The first page was not that interesting to me, but I decided to keep reading because I thought the book could get better. The farther I kept reading, the more I realized that the book was not interesting to me. In the end, I quit reading before I finished the first chapter. Since that point, I don't think I have ever finished a book that didn't excite me after the first page.

My Reading Log
11/8 - 11:30-12:00 am
11/9 - 10:30-11:00 pm
11/10 - 1:30-2:00 pm