One of the great things about long distance travelling is that you have plenty of time for reading. I managed to finish two and a half books on my first leg of the trip, borrowed from my local library, with one of them being one of the most popular books at the moment, Freakonomics.

Successful writers in a technical area tend to be those that have great expressive powers by communicating ideas in a way that everyone can understand. The success of this book is a typical example, tackling real life subjects that all people from all walks of life can relate to, but analysed in economic terms and distilled in a way that the majority of the popular can understand.

The authors wrote the book extremely well and though some may argue there is no continuous theme throughout the book, I found it more like a book of short stories that may actually appeal to some people. For people like me that have to finish a book when they start it, it is a refreshing style and its simple language and expressiveness had no obvious impact on the flow of the book as I read it.

I took away a number of things from this book including the lesson that we should always challenge (appropriately) conventional wisdom and the amazing observations you can make simply by accumulating large sets of data over a long time (another blog entry coming soon). I found the book was more importantly humorous in its approach and the conversation had an overall light-hearted tone that I think will appeal to a broad range of people. More importantly anyone of any background can read this book and come away with something, if not just a little bit of laughter.

TheKua.com Rating: 8.5 out of 10