Books Thinking Fast And Slow Novels & Stories

Julian Blackwood didn't believe in *kindness*. He believed in **results**. In **control**. In **winning**. And yet as he stood in the midst of *Chapter & Soul* bookstore, with Lena Carter's soft voice still lingering at the edges of his mind like morning mist, something strange tangled deep in his chest. "*Maybe you should start,"* she had breathed. An effortless sentence. Soft, nearly shy. But it had hit harder than any boardroom betrayal or market crash he'd ever faced.

I felt heat start to pool low and a blush start to crawl up my neck. "About his ability to make himself everyone's problem." "Well, that tracks. At least from the little bit I've known him." She leaned closer to Rowan's section and started reading the titles off like she was browsing a bookstore. The books were a chaotic mix, some genuinely useful, others questionably so, but all jammed together in no particular order. She pointed to the first spine, reading it outloud, her voice dripping with judgement. "How to Win and Argument Without Throwing a Punch."

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What a spiteful little man, she thought. Caitlin wasted no time. She cracked open the first book, an old tome from the nineteenth century, thick, leather-bound. As she turned its frail and brittle pages, she went into speed-reading mode, reading the pages faster than she ever had in her life, looking for keywords, places, locations, ideas. Anything that would lead to another book, another idea, another lead, another clue. Anything with substance.

I need to process and just have a minute to breathe. I turn the books the right way up and try to slide them back into the shelves silently when the title of the first catches my eye and stops me pushing it in. It’s a psychology textbook about his personality condition and I impulsively tip it sideways to let the pages flip open for a quick nosey. That part of me that is eager to know more about what it means in terms of him as a person kicking in. I scan the words eagerly, desperate for more insight.

"You’re not done. Now sort the books by how interesting the titles sound." I spun around. "You’re kidding, right?" He gave a smug grin. "Call it a test of your intellectual instincts." Rolling my eyes so hard it nearly caused whiplash, I started pulling books off the shelf and organized them into very important categories: "Billionaire Brainwashing" (titles like How to Win at Negotiations, Stock Market Secrets—snoozefest.) "Mildly Interesting" (like The Psychology of Power—kind of creepy, but curious.)

He would be totally shocked if Hans finished reading those 8 books in just a short amount of time. Hans put down the book he was currently reading and confusedly asked, “Which books are you referring to?” Anthony pointed at the 8 books piled in shock. But what surprised him, even more, is when Hans nodded. He really finished reading those books. That’s ridiculous! “What?!… How did you read those books? By just scanning them?” Those books weren’t thin in the first place. Each book consists of 400 pages or more. Hans reading it at a fast pace is like how a photocopier works. It’s very fast.

he said, low. "A thing doesn't get to be that old by being slow." I was talking faster now, dread doing it for me. "It's one of two things. Either it's a brute, an animal that happens to last, and you can maybe out-think a brute. Or it's not. Maybe it's like us. It shifts, it thinks, it remembers, and it has had a hundred of your lifetimes to get good at all three while you got the seventy years of living the rest of us get."

--- The conversations the book was generating were different from the conversations the posts had generated. The posts had produced recognition — the immediate, often emotional response of someone who encounters something that names their own experience precisely. The book produced something slower and deeper than recognition. It produced thinking. She could see this in the way people wrote about it — the messages that arrived not immediately after reading but days later, sometimes weeks later, from people who had finished it and then continued to be inside it and had arrived, eventually, at something they wanted to say.

With a gentle hug, I put the book down and immediately left for work. At 5:30 I was behind the shop waiting for my employers. I began to think about what happened last night. I was contemplating how a small book could increase in size by itself. The book could talk and give instructions for humans to follow. What amazed me more was the fact that fire of blood could rest in a bowl and the book didn’t burn but when I put my hand I was burning that I could even felt the fire even in my intestines.