I feel as though I may have been Jedi-mind-tricked by Richard Dooling. Mr. Dooling is the author of my latest read, Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ. For the life of me, though, I can’t come up with much to say about this book. It’s like my mind has already been wiped: “These are not the droids you’re looking for…and this is not the book you just read.”
The book started out with a wonderful bang: It was funny, engaging, captivating. Then it started to stray from the path of interesting and entertaining—and that’s when my cruise control kicked in. I think that’s why I don’t remember much about this book even though I just finished it two nights ago. I don’t think I was really absorbing most of what I was reading. Even the geekiest of geeks can only absorb so much geekery in one dose.
Mr. Dooling crams an awful lot of geekery into this book, without much in the sense of structure (how do you structure a flood?). There is a lot of interesting stuff here—factoids, trivia, and all kinds of tasty flotsam for geek consumption. My brain just couldn’t process it all. I guess it all got sent to the same bin where my brain stored all that it “learned” in high school geometry, algebra, and chemistry. You know, that giant, echoey hallway where all the voices sound like the sad trombone noise that adults make whenever they speak in Peanuts cartoons.
Final score: 2.5/5. I was very excited about reading this book. I think my excitement far exceeded the pay-off. Plus, a personal gripe: Don’t use a narrow, single-spaced 10-point sans serif font for your nearly-300-page book. My eyes are very angry with you right now, Mr. Dooling.
