The Know-It-All

written by A.J. Jacobs

This was a book that came to me from my boss. She picked up a copy for me and a copy for herself because her daughter had read a bit of it and thought it good. It's a funny, funny book, but man, you need to read it in small doses. Jacobs' style is a bit like Dave Barry's: extremely entertaining, but after a while, extremely exhausting.

Jacobs took a year to read through the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and somehow managed to turn his experience into 369 pages of light and funny reading. The book includes his reflections on key Brittanica entries and a lot of self-deprecating humor and personal stories about his own life. It also contains an absolutely dizzying amount of trivia gleaned from the pages of the Britannica. Someone with a better memory than I might actually learn some things from this book, but I think the only fact I remember is that gymnasium, when translated literally in Greek, means "school of naked exercise." Who knew?

The book is organized alphabetically, just like the encyclopedia. So you'll find a healthy handful of entries regarding words that begin with A, another bunch for B, and so on. It's easy to read this book in short bits of time because most entries are less than a page long. And short bits of time are perfect, since he does start to get annoying if you read too much at a time. He's a really entertaining writer, but you can only take so much sitcom-esque material at one time.

The New York Times calls Jacobs a "stunt journalist" because he tends to do crazy things and then write funny stuff after the fact. In addition to the Britannica stunt, he also wrote a book called The Year of Living Biblically, in which he documented how he dedicated one year of his life to carrying out the literal interpretation of every command he could find in the Bible.

Overall, this is a fun and easy read.