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.