I finished Blink over the weekend, but it wasn’t as great a book as Tipping Point was. The arguments were not as clear or eye-opening. Though I wanted to be on Malcolm Gladwell’s side, I felt like a lot of the time he was just grabbing at straws, hoping we would be able to understand him. The concepts he was trying to present are not too abstract for the general public. I feel like if you got Tipping Point, you’d easily get Blink, but the presentation of his examples was almost too plentiful. They were scattered, and in the overall scope of things, made his arguments seemed watered down.

Now that I think about it, Gladwell did exactly what he’s arguing against in getting the point of Blink across. He inundated us with information, when his whole thing was about being able to get what you need to know in order to understand something through the abbreviating process of thin-slicing. Oh well, maybe he’s paid by the number of pages he publishes.

Instead of glowing about Gladwell like I did before, I’m going to glow about someone else. I learned about Sloane Crosley when Emily Gould reviewed her book of essays, I Was Told There’d be Cake, for Radar Online. (This title also pretty much sums up how Bongo feels every time he arrives at a party. Or at work, even.) Crosley is a book publicist, very young and accomplished in comparison to the rest of the industry, and reportedly also very nice. Normally I don’t feel compelled to take online book reviews seriously, but for some reason I felt pre-ordering Cake would be a safe bet. Fortunately for Crosley, Amazon, and me, it was.

Crosley is the kind of female writer I would one day like to be. I found familiarity in Candace Bushnell’s voice and Lauren Weisberger’s voice, but I couldn’t fully align with them. (If you’ve read Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada, you’d know they’re not as pink and ditzy as HBO and FOX would like you to think. In fact, they’re both kind of bleak at their ends.) They were almost too magenta for me, too fashion-focused, too man-crazy. Crosley is a nice mixture of quirky, confident, and intelligent leaning toward the nerdier side of the spectrum. Her essays are quick reads and she’d be the type of person you’d want to meet with for coffee even when you don’t drink coffee.

She talks about this strange pony collection that exes have left her with. And accidentally taking home a rare species of butterfly from the butterfly exhibit she was begrudgingly volunteering at. Her book cover seems to encapsulate the glamorous side of more hipster interior decoration, and the sans serif font combined with all those flowery figures is so 2008. I also like this about her, from her bio, “She also wrote the cover story for the worst-selling issue of Maxim in that magazine’s history.” She’s just charming.

If I ever have kids, this is what I’m going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil – preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp – destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you’ve been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.

“Bastard Out of Westchester”
I Was Told There’d be Cake
by Sloane Crosley

Finally, in an age where I really miss pop-up books, Crosley crafted dioramas to illustrate her visual interpretation of her stories. Check out the rest of The Diorama Diaries on Flickr. Here’s my favorite one, from the Sign Language for Infidels set.