The Know-It-All and Other Fine Tales

Tonight was my Stranger Than Fiction book club at the library, and I gave a talk on The Know-It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, by A.J. Jacobs. I absolutely love this hilarious volume, but even more so the concept behind it. Anyone who sets out a challenge for themselves to read an entire set of encyclopedias is my kind of person. Plus it’s filled with fascinating but relatively useless facts – also up my alley. Every single one of his entries is laugh-out-loud funny. Although my library has several copies, this is one I wanted to own. It’s out in paperback too.

This book club is pretty cool, mostly because it’s strictly non-fiction. Everything in public libraries is all fiction, all the time, so I’m trying to change that. Selecting titles to discuss is semi-difficult, because you can’t really choose a brick, and it has to grab them. There are also far fewer resources available to reviewers than there are for fiction, although thankfully, that’s changing. The other titles we’ve read so far were very good for both piquing interest and stirring discussion, so I may as well suggest them to you, should you want a good non-fiction read. Here they are (in the order we did them):

Banvard’s Folly - Paul Collins
Salt: a World History – Mark Kurlansky
Tulipomania - Mike Dash
Hope: Adventures of a Diamond – Marian Fowler
The Great Hedge of India – Roy Moxham
Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach

I’ll let you know how future books go. It’s funny, but I die every time I have to prepare for one of these talks, spending hours writing and doing research. They always go well in the end, so I don’t know why I stress so much. Maybe it adds spice, who knows.

I’ve been in front of my computer screen for about 14 hours today, so I think I shall call it quits.

Comments

[miriam's ideas]

When I was a kid I tried to read the entire encyclopedia--to be fair it was World Book--but I lost interest at about L. Or puberty intervened. Those old World Book volumes were wonderful.