A review by mesy_mark
Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us by Joe Palca, Flora Lichtman

informative lighthearted

2.5

 This was an interesting thing to learn that not much science has been done on annoyance. And I think that is what made this a hard book to get through. Because there is no dedication to studying annoyance, more like anger/frustration, it is hard to get data in annoyance. Data that actually involved collected on humans seemed to come as a by-product of being ethically unable to make a subject enraged for the goal of researching anger. Animal models are hard to pinpoint as we can't ask was this annoying or angry making we can only go on with behavior. As for the subjects on annoying that was covered. Some seemed appropriate more of the ones involving people as humans tend to have high amounts of human interactions so greater chances for annoyance but others like skunk spray, flies just seemed like annoying things for sure but less interesting than getting down to human habit/behavior ticking other humans off. Another thing about the book is that both authors read the book in audiobook format. Both have easy to listen to voices what was not easy to listen to was the voices changed at random points in the book. There seemed no rhyme or reason to when one narrator would end their section and the other would begin. I could see it at each chapter as a narrator changed but it happened in chapters and well, that was annoying. Maybe a point of the audiobook to make a point of the book? Overall I would rate this a 2.5 out of 5 stars