Book Review: "Irresistible" by Joshua Paul Dale

Full Title: "Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World" by Joshua Paul Dale

This book struck me as odd. I was seeing it everywhere. It was the Radio 4 Book and I could have sworn it was in my copy of the Times Literary Supplement at one point. Needless to say, I had high hopes for this book but I also may have over-hyped it for myself at the time of buying.

When I initially started reading it, I wavered. I thought it was a boring mess of opinions and cultural satire. It didn't make a lot of sense to me and yet, I knew I had to keep reading because I wanted it to get better. I will say one thing: this book takes an awfully long time to actually get to the point. Filled with anecdotes that the reader does not really care about and tropes that are left a little unexplored - who knew that a book dedicated to cuteness and consumerism could be so dry and dull?

This is a classic case where the book sounds a lot more interesting than it actually is. Apart from stating the obvious for three chapters, this book does not go into too much apart from simply comparing everything to the Japanese cult of cuteness.

As I have already stated, it takes a long time to get you to care about what's going on. There's a lot of back and forth about Japanese Culture, which, if you're not into Japanese Culture, will make little sense to you whatsoever. This is coming from someone who is a huge fan of Japanese Culture.

I think that the one thing I liked about this book is how much depth it goes into when it does talk about things like The Pillow Book and how it describes things about cuteness and how the idea and theories around cuteness are underanalysed. I guess there is a first for everything and therefore, this writer needs to be the one to do it. However, I do not think that this is the way I would structure it.

Here is what I would do. Instead of interweaving the Japanese culture and historical writings with theories about cuteness (such as child schema), I would instead spend an entire chapter or so looking at the theories on their own and in possibly a more modern and universal context. Then, I would go back and cover the Japanese ideas in the next chapters, giving the theories to them now that the reader understands what they are.

The problem here was that in the midst of reading about The Pillow Book and then reading about Pikachu and Anime, there were all these psychological theories of cuteness that the reader was not familiar with going on. One moment we were looking at some sort of giant Pikachu festival where there were Pikachu and neon lights on the streets of Harajuku, Japan, the next we were looking at what happened for Japan to become so involved with cuteness, the next thing we were looking at the theories of cuteness and what it is and then we were looking at The Pillow Book and old Japanese eras. This then happens over and over again and it leaves the reader experience very confused and obviously, you can imagine how I felt about it.

As the book goes on though, this becomes more and more clear but I think that when it begins, there could have been a lot that was done better structurally. A reader who does not know about this stuff would not be any wiser after reading the first sections. But, if they stuck it out then it might work. The question is after a few chapters, will they stick it out? Some probably won't and will be left more confused than before.

All in all, I thought that the intentions were definitely there and the concept was there too. However, the book is dull and often confusing, with too many chapters dedicated to nothing in particular except for the mixture between things - there is a definite requirement for editing and even splitting down the chapters even more. A requirement for understanding that the reader is not on the same knowledge level as the writer is a special ckill that's definitely not explored here.