Andy Andrews’ The Noticer is one in a long line of current self-help/spiritual books.  And it reads just like all the rest.

It’s an OK story–I did want to know how the book ended, so I read it pretty quickly.  Several things about the book bothered me, however.  First of all, the line between fact and fiction was almost impossible to locate.  Based on what I knew of the author’s personal life, I spent at least half of the book wondering if he was claiming that the events he was writing about had actually transpired, or if it was just an allegory.  I prefer my reading to be more straightforward–fact of fiction; I want to know upfront, because that impacts how I read the book.

The other thing that really bothered me about this book is the fact that it’s not at all original.  The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman is mimicked in the form of “four love dialects.” which turned out to be the exact same thing that Chapman has been writing about for years, with two of the original languages combined into one “dialect,” and the rest remaining the same.

The rest of the book followed in the same vein–a lack of original ideas, and nothing really helpful.