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So ironic that a book about pleasure has left me bored out of my mind. I'm not sure what this guy's qualifications are, but I disagree with the majority of what he says. It wasn't interesting. He glossed over sex which is surely the part we're all wondering about 🙄 Do yourself a favour and don't bother.

I had nothing against Paul Bloom's style for the durration of the book. In fact, I rather enjoyed his style and thought his simple language and format would be an adequate way of describing why we like what we like.

You can sum up Bloon's entire 200 page argument in about 2 sentences. "We like things when we feel there is an associated essential quality to their being, imparted from either and internal or external source. The extent of our likes vary across several categories, including food, sex and religion; however, all of those categories are based on the same desire for essentialism."

Although this book has a "why" in the title, every explanation is based on correlation, not causation. Again, these are fine conclusions to draw, but they are only interesting for about chapter. The anecdotes and transitional stories were great, but I wanted a greater overall theme, not something that could be summed up so quickly with a slew of anecdotal evidence.

Really interesting, but I wish it hadn't taken so long to get through it.. I need to finish my books faster!

This book was fun to read, but I had a hard time with some of Bloom's arguments. It often seemed he came at a subject from limited perspectives, or didn't try to stray far beyond his box. For example, there was clearly not a lot of talking with women in preparation for this book. Bloom had some really interesting experiments with babies and toddlers, but I think he didn't actually try to think like a child -- at one point he says that children don't create art with the intention of gaining advantage with their parents over siblings, but what kid with a contentious sibling relationship hasn't made a parent a gift to try and take the spot of "favorite"? Clever, but not too clever.

A fun and quick read. Still in the philosophical vein, yes, but generally grounded in science, so it's all good. While yes, the only things any of us technically enjoy are dopamine & seratonin, Bloom works one level up from this & divides the book into several broad categories of things that give humans pleasure:

* Foodies (food & drink)
* Bedtricks (sex)
* Irreplaceable (sentimentality)
* Performance (arts & sports)
* Imagination (books, movies, TV, video games, etc.)
* Safety & pain (horror/tragedy, sadism/masochism)

In each section he talks about the evolutionary basis for why we like different these things, including lots of interesting examples & research results. Having been a psychology minor, a good chunk of it was work I was already familiar with, but there was definitely plenty of new ideas & information that was fun to learn about. There are connections to aesthetics & ethics in some sections, but everything is grounded in research or at the very least scientific hypothesis reasonably based on research. Interesting & worth the time.

Essentialism, biology, natural selection. Could have probably just read the introduction and been done with it. Loaded with references to a lot of obvious-seeming studies.

Interesting premise, but the way Bloom tries to draw in the reader with a discussion on cannibalism was a little unsettling to start off with. The ideas were interesting but repetitive. The concepts (basically, that objects and pleasures have non-physical essences that we humans care about) as well as the supporting studies Bloom described (such as those about children and intuitive essentialism) made this worth reading, but the quality of writing made it a bit of a drag.

"We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels."

"Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else."

"The difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination."