Gave it a good go but stopped at chapter 15 - just disliked the main character far too much to continue

Although this book holds lessons that are meant to be timeless, I'm not sure it's aged very well. I kept on stopping, especially in the later chapters, to dig into the veracity of the ideas proposed:

- They can predict the future popularity of baby names (I dug up the list of most popular California baby names in 2015 and it doesn't match the list they predicted of most popular California baby names for that year)
- Switzerland has a higher number of guns per capita than the US does (that does not seem to be the case, even taking into account the firearms that males in the Switzerland military keep in their home)
- Hiring more police will reduce crime (there's a lot of mixed evidencing about this to pick through, especially with the ongoing discussions about defunding the police)
- the Shangri-la diet in the Bonus Material (which involves eating something flavourless such as spoonfuls of olive oil(!!!) in between meals to reduce hunger, and even til now doesn't seem to have great evidencing of effectiveness)
- A rational individual should abstain from voting in the Bonus Material chapter

Most of the chapters were written in a really entertaining way, aside from the baby name chapter which held so many lists of names that my eyes started to glaze over. The NYT profile that Dinner wrote of Levitt was quite fawning, so I'm relieved the second edition of this book moved it to the bonus material instead of keeping it as excerpts in front of each chapter.

Unexpectedly, this has turned out to be my favourite of all the Bronte books. The characters are flawed but remarkably self-aware. Helen's POV was brilliant in its intensity. My only quibble was Gilbert's character in the later chapters of the book - he was unnecessarily dramatic, his sense of entitlement rose with his passion for Helen, and he was a poor friend even on the best of times to Lawrence

The amazingly droll writing about the boating trip was unfortunately accompanied with a lot of rambling info-dumps and over-romanticised musings which jarred with the tone and pacing quite unpleasantly.