You’re almost 60 years old, and your wife wants a divorce. Your health isn’t exactly great thanks to the cancer you just beat back and it seem clear that your daughter–your only child–doesn’t like you very much.

What do you do with the rest of your life?

That’s the fundamental question answered in Paul Auster’s novel “The Brooklyn Follies.” This is the second Auster novel on my bookshelf, after reading “The Book of Illusions” in 2008. My thoughts on that title here.

“Brooklyn Follies” shows how you can make the decision to dust yourself off, cast aside all of the negative aspects of your life and resolve to basically start over. The main character, Nathan, goes back to Brooklyn, the place where he grew up, and rebuilds his life one lunch and one project at a time.

The beauty of Auster’s writing is the ability to start with a relatively simple cast of characters and bring out their complexity one by one. He’s then able to meld them together, amplifying those character traits in a way that wasn’t apparent on their own. When a new player enters the scene, there’s a sort of mystery novel element to each one, giving you the feeling that no matter how small their role now you know they are going to play a part in the larger story later on.

My favorite example in this book is a young girl, Nathan’s great-niece. Early on you learn her mother is not exactly in the reliable department, foreshadowing a time when the mother’s decisions eventually force her to send the girl to her uncle (Nathan’s nephew, the mother’s brother). The girl, Lucy, is incredibly smart but suffers all kinds of issues from growing up in a less-than-stellar home environment. But she has quirks that you can’t help but laugh at sometimes.

Her mother tells the story of when Lucy was in daycare, and the teacher called her mother with a concern: “When it came time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would always hang back until all the other kids had taken a carton before she’d take one herself. The teacher didn’t understand. Go get your milk, she’d say to Lucy, but Lucy would always wait around until there was just one carton left. It took a while for me to figure it out. Lucy didn’t know which carton was supposed to be her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which ones were theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton in the box, that one had to be hers.”

You can clearly see that scene playing out, the little girl leaning against the wall trying not to be noticed. Her eyes are wide as she slowly watches the milk cartons disappearing. She looks down and shuffles her feet, trying to act casually indifferent as the worry rages inside her. As the last kid in line approaches the carton she slips in behind him, ready to claim her milk and give a sigh of relief as another day in a system she doesn’t understand passes by.

Nathan has a friendship with a rare book dealer for whom his nephew works. The nephew is a grad-school dropout who was studying literature and thus knows tons of random stories about authors. He tells one about Franz Kafka going to a park where he finds a young girl who is upset about losing a doll. He tells the girl that the doll went on a trip, which he knows because the doll gave him a letter. The girl asks to see it, and he tells her he left it at home but will bring it to her. Kafka goes home and composes a letter, from the point of view of a doll, and gives it to her. He writes one every day for three weeks, slowly separating the doll from the girl’s life until she’s no longer sad the doll has moved on.

One reason I’m reading less so far this year is that I have been spending time on a writing project of my own, one that involves composing letters from a fictional person who also happens to be female. It’s a really interesting challenge to write outside of your “voice” especially when you are putting yourself in a perspective completely opposite of your life experience.

A last interesting tidbit from Auster’s story. One of Nathan’s last ideas in the book is to create a service for “regular” people to commission their own biographies. If you’re famous, it’s not hard to get someone to write about you. If you’re famous enough, hundreds of writers will take on your life story. His idea is to create a sort of insurance where you pay a small amount each month and at the end of your life your relatives get a book about you.

I wasn’t near the Internet when I finished the book so I couldn’t look to see if this kind of service actually exists, since it seems like a pretty logical enterprise. Today I spent about seven seconds on Google and found that for roughly $15,000 this British company will write a biography about anyone. Not sure if they’ll travel to the United States.

How much can you learn about something or someone in the blink of an eye?

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” the answer is far more than you would ever think. I’ll do my best to avoid rhyming for the rest of this post, but no promises.

Gladwell writes about many different studies and situation in which people rely on their first impression. The result is that a lot of times it appears that your first inkling, that very first feeling you get when you look at someone, can often be right.

One of his examples is a study of teacher effectiveness. Researchers compared evaluations from students after a semester of class with people who only saw short clips of the same teacher. Those short clips were just 10 seconds long, then cut to five and eventually two seconds — all without sound. In the end, those evaluating the teacher based on a two second clip without sound came up with virtually the same results as those who took an entire semester course.

It is that kind of first impression that can be very useful in helping us move through our lives. If something feels wrong, there’s a good chance there is a problem. What Gladwell says is that in many of those experiences you don’t can’t express why you feel the way you do because that information is buried in your subconscious.

Sometimes it takes time for the active part of your brain to catch up and be able to make sense of what your body instinctively already figured out.

Another extension of that thought is the idea of “priming,” which involves cueing someone to an action without them realizing they are being affected in that way.

One study Gladwell brings up here involves subjects who have to walk down a long hallway to reach a testing room. There they are giving sets of five words — three of which can be put together to make a simple sentence. They are asked to do so as quickly as possible. What they don’t know is that one word in each group are designed to make them feel old (Florida, gray, lonely). Then they compare how quickly the subjects walk down the hallway afterwards, and found they walk much more slowly.

The implications of priming could have some of the most practical value of the things Gladwell brings up in the book. He also writes about a study similar to one I read a few years ago in which minority students were asked to list their race before taking a test, with a control group taking the test without the classification.

The outcomes of these tests have all shown that when students are asked to list their race, they tend to perform as a stereotypical student of that race. Black students score much lower overall, Asian students score higher on math, etc. Those in the control groups don’t show those changes in performance, which are dramatic differences.

Gladwell writes that this book is much less of a call-to-action type of read than his first. I wrote about “The Tipping Point” last year, which breaks down society into different groups of people needed to take an idea/product/etc. from slow adoption to prevalence in our society.

If we are to give attention to one idea in “Blink” it has to be the effects of priming. Standardized tests exist for the purpose of comparing a large set of students on what is supposed to be an equal playing field. But there exist very real implications if we have priming questions that so grossly distort the performance of many test-takers.

One of the reasons there are boxes for race on national tests are to collect the data necessary to evaluate how scores change over time within and among certain groups. Take away those questions, and we lose the data. But with so many studies showing that those boxes can have such an adverse effect on the outcomes of the test, do we need to continue collecting what we know is compromised data?

“Blink” also opens a Pandora’s box of feeling manipulated by corporate America. As I begin to catch up with the rest of the world on the show “Mad Men,” there are lots of parallels about how seemingly simple things have a huge effect on how a product sells. Change a bottle, the color of the shirt the mascot is wearing on the label, and you have a chunk of market share.

Gladwell talks about the Pepsi Challenge, in which soda drinkers were blindfolded and given sips of Pepsi and Coke and asked to pick which one they prefer. The result was a big win for Pepsi, as far as the Challenge went. When it came to sales, Pepsi still lagged. Gladwell interviewed a former Pepsi executive who said that type of sip test brings a “blink” judgment, one that will always be won by the sweeter product. Over time, however, tests in which people have the product in their home for a week or a month are far more effective in determining future sales.

If you’re interested in how our judgment can help make decisions before our brains even know what’s going on, definitely dive into this one. I don’t think you can go wrong with Gladwell’s style and the interesting ways he looks at the way we react to our world. That said, if you’re new to Gladwell I think “The Tipping Point” is about 1 percent better.

Nick Hornby’s “A Long Way Down” is the most entertaining book I’ve ever read about suicide.

It is one of those books I picked up off a bookstore shelf a year ago, didn’t buy, and looked at it every single time I went to a bookstore after that. The premise of four people deciding independently to jump off the same building on the same night, only to obviously run into one another is an intriguing start to a story.

Having each of those four people serve as narrators in a sort of rotating fashion is not only an interesting way to tell the story, but also pretty impressive. These are four really different people, and effectively finding a voice for each to be able to move the story is an accomplishment.

I probably dog-eared more pages in this book than any other this year. That means I was either really into it, or had near rage blackouts because it infuriated me so much. Fortunately, Hornby is a pretty solid writer so it was more in the “enjoyed” category.

I have written before about modern society’s need for everyone to be great, for kids to be special and for everyone to think they deserve everything. One of the characters, JJ, just broke up with his girlfriend on the heels of having his band fall apart: “The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re fucking geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something. It’s our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century.”

When I was “just” selling shoes, I heard a lot of “why aren’t you” kind of talk. But the reality was, despite certain frustrations specific to that company, it really wasn’t such a bad deal. It was something I was great at, got me a discount on things I used, put me in touch with new people every day with a chance to help them and often allowed me to wake up without an alarm. Plus it was the closest I will ever work to a Taco Bell.

Just a few pages later, a teenage girl named Jess is taking care of the narrating duties. This is one of those writing challenges I find fascinating — how an older male puts himself believably in the shoes of a teenage girl. She’s talking about the group of four potential jumpers, and the propensity for people to label individuals in certain sized groups according to popular culture. In this case, who in the group would be which member of The Beatles. Years ago you could have heard your friends posit on which “Friends” cast member each would be, or which “Sex & The City” gal best matched you. But being fictional characters, there’s always a flaw to this approach and Jess quickly realizes it’s not going to work out. “Thinking about it, maybe we were more like another group with four people in it,” she said.

Of course one of the great things about writers with multiple books is being able to draw parallels between them. Last year I read Hornby’s “How to be Good,” featuring the amazing character DJ GoodNews. And who should make a cameo appearance on page 181? The one and only DJ GoodNews. I practically shouted his name in excitement.

For some reason I found the inner thoughts of Jess to be the most insightful. She alienates all of her friends, her sister ran away from home and her parents sort of wrote her off as a lost cause. She talks about the benefit of having large chain stores instead of more personal, mom-and-pop kinds of places: “I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. I’m happiest…where no one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point.”

I also like her frequent use of the word “der.” When I moved to Jacksonville a few years ago, I went to a place where I knew absolutely nobody. Some people would find this absolutely frightening and would never try it. I know some of my friends said they couldn’t do it. But I will say there was a certain interesting dynamic knowing you could go to a store, the beach, a restaurant or just walk down the street and be 100 percent positive you would not run into someone you know. That also helps when you’re hungry and don’t feel like showering or even putting on clean clothes before going to the grocery store.

Jess also talks about how her dad always said she could do anything or be anything (despite what JJ may have said about that notion). But in the end, there are certain characteristics that always bring us back to who we really are. No matter how much you try to remove the barriers, at some point we just can’t get out of our own ways. She says: “Telling me I can do anything is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.”

I’m always a sucker for a good rant about people who aren’t into reading and look down upon those who do. And through JJ, Hornby delivers: “Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty antisocial when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Game Boy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up fucking space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that ‘American Pastoral’ isn’t.” Amen.

Doing the daily crossword in the Washington Post always makes me wonder how on Earth I know certain random pieces of information. It’s like being with a group of people who have no expectation that you would know one of their other friends, or have heard of their obscure college. They always ask, “how did you know…” The explanation is always longer than it should be and would usually be better if accompanied by graphs and charts.

Hornby delivers one of these for me on page 196 with the line “Or that Australian girl who used to be on ‘Neighbours.'” I am not from Australia, or from England where this story takes place. I have never seen “Neighbours.” But I know he’s talking about Delta Goodrem. How I know this would take a solid 5,000 words to explain, and perhaps someday I’ll do that. But I will share a bit about Delta.

For anyone who has been in search of “the next step” in life, be it between jobs or just out of school, you know there is advice coming to you from every direction. You have heard it for years — talk to this person, take this class, get an internship, don’t do be like him, market yourself, break up with that guy, blah blah blah. Delta’s song “In My Own Time” begins: “So much is happening to me, so much that I can’t even see, so many words of wisdom that I am trying to be.”

And that’s sort of what these four characters are going through. There is a lot going on in their lives, a lot of thoughts swirling in their heads and a lot of opinions as to what they should be doing. It is up to them to figure out how to put it all together, and be.

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

That’s the opening line to Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” describing the feeling of systematically destroying the world’s hidden caches of books.

I wonder how our society would respond to a governmental anti-book policy. Sure, there are lots of us who love to read and consider books an important part of our lives. But what about those who could really care less?

If Major League Soccer folded tomorrow, I honestly wouldn’t think twice about it while die-hard U.S. soccer fans might be devastated. The same goes for coffee — I don’t drink it, so I really wouldn’t care.

Bradbury paints a world where leaders are scared by an informed public and sees banning books as an integral part of its control:

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.”

It is a world of dulled senses and stilted emotions, one marked by living room walls made up of giant television screens assuring everyone that everything is OK.

But like Winston in George Orwell’s “1984,” not everyone is content to buy into the system. Some people still think, still read those banned books even though they risk being caught and facing a fiery penalty.

If you enjoyed “1984” you’d absolutely get into this book. In a post-story interview in my edition, Bradbury explains the difference as Orwell tackling the implications of governmental control while he deals with the societal fallout.

The “bonus material” also adds a great tidbit about Bradbury renting time on a typewriter in the UCLA library in order to write the book. He says it cost 10 cents for a half hour, leading him to write the book at a furious pace — half of it (25,000 words) in nine days.

Despite the novel’s themes of having to fight attacks against intellectualism and personal voice, Bradbury weaves in moments of individual triumph. He portrays humans as having a hopeful spirit, one that perseveres through obstacles that will eventually ensure their own failure.

He writes: “It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. The lawn cutter might just as well have not been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

Here’s to hoping people never lose the desire to create and share and think.

Sometimes you read a book and you and the author are not on the same wavelength.

Your eyes move over their words, but there’s something between you that just doesn’t click. I do not have that problem with Malcolm Gladwell.

“Whenever I look at an unopened bar of Ivory bath soap, I flip it over and burst out laughing,” Gladwell writes in his book “The Tipping Point.” “In the midst of all the product information, there is a line that says: ‘Questions? Comments? Call 1-800-395-9960.’ Who on earth could ever have a question about Ivory soap.”

If you’ve spent any time whatsoever reading this blog, you’d know that about half my entries are about just those sorts of questions. But while I mention the potential craziness of such situations, Gladwell is off being smarter than me. He thinks about why that’s actually a brilliant thing to put on the box.

It all comes down to what he describes in the book as “mavens.” These are people in our society who spend more time thinking about and researching products than the rest of us. They are the ones we would go to when we have questions–because we know they will always have good advice. So if you’re the Ivory Soap Company, you want to make it easy for the mavens to get their questions answered, since they’re really the only ones calling about soap. Then when I ask Joe Maven about soap, he’ll tell me Ivory is where it’s at.

Gladwell also taught me a lot about important things like “Blues Clues.” I had no idea Nickelodeon played the same exact episode of “Blues Clues” for five straight days. Because of the way kids learn, that turns out to be a pretty brilliant strategy and one Gladwell explains in detail. You can enjoy that when you read the book yourself–which you absolutely should.

I also learned that Paul Revere wasn’t the only midnight rider trying to warn colonists about the advancing British. It turns out he was the one who effectively spread the message because of his personal qualities. Revere was an example of what Gladwell calls “The Law of the Few.” He says that in order for social epidemics to spread, it is important to have the message in the hands of the right people. It’s more effective to tell five Revere types who can reach a wide range–with a sense of authority–than to reach a thousand people who don’t have a connective power.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go call a guy about some soap.

Today was a fantastic day. A great, old friend came back into my life and I can’t think of a better addition to my Tuesday. That friend is chocolate Teddy Grahams.

Early this afternoon I had a hankering for a snack, nothing too big but enough to squelch the “I’m hungry” voice beckoning from my belly. I opened our pantry cabinet dealio to hunt for potential remedies. My eyes scanned over boxes of Pop-Tarts, granola bars and peanut butter crackers. I started to choose one of those satisfactory but not excellent snacks when I came upon a truly exciting box.

Teddy Grahams have been one of my favorite snacks since they were first thought of by the guy who invented them. I loved them before he or she even told anyone else about their idea for a bear-shaped cookie-type snack that comes in several delicious flavors.

We didn’t have them very often at my house, but they were a staple in my grandmother’s snack cabinet. There was nothing finer than a trip to Nana’s, complete with noshing on Teddy Grahams during a break from the pool.

Today I didn’t have quite the same experience. It’s about 37 degrees outside and there’s no pool here in the basement. But the taste of the Teddys brought me to my happy place like granola bars could never do.

Another recent smile-inducing moment was brought to me by my good friend TV. Actually, it was whomever decided a Web site called OnlineBootyCall was a good idea and made it happen.

Now I’m not saying I’m all about utilizing such a service. I just enjoyed this commercial for the site as it played during a popular TV show last week. The sheer bluntness of it is incredible. It’s not one of those jeans commercials where the only reason you know jeans are involved are because there’s a pair slumped over a chair deep in the background. You know exactly what OnlineBootyCall.com is about.

Don’t want a pesky relationship? Don’t want to promise marriage just to hook up? OnlineBootyCall is for you!

And lest you think I have abandoned reading for additional hours of television, here’s the stack of completed books in 2009:

That’s seven so far. For comparison sake, I was just finishing the second of 2008 at this point in the year.

This year’s picks thus far:
-The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
-Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
-You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers
-IV by Chuck Klosterman
-The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin
-The Winter Of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
-The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Despite my heroic efforts, it appears the Year of the Book was not a nationwide project.

In fact, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of adults who read any book not required for work or school dropped in 2008. While I knocked out 20 titles, only 54.3 percent of adults finished even one. The Washington Post has more.

Come on people!

It’s not like there aren’t amazing stories awaiting people’s attention. Maybe if people were inside reading books murder rates and overall crime would plummet. Maybe car crashes would be a thing of the past if people had a book in their hand instead of a steering wheel (hopefully not trying to do both at the same time). Perhaps ratings for TMZ and Access Hollywood would be taken to crushingly low levels if turned off in favor of literature.

I certainly won’t hold my breath. But I will do my part and keep reading.