The Know-It-All - A.J. Jacobs

This was a piece of fun I'd been putting off for a long time. In case you missed it, A.J. Jacobs, worried that the frivolity and pop culture-focus of his New York life (and of his job at Esquire) had placed him on a path of ever-increasing stupidity, spent 2002 reading cover-to-cover through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Half-almanac, half-confessional memoir, this book records Jacobs's education and epiphanies, interlaced with his year's worth of office antics, family gatherings, and seemingly fruitless attempts to conceive a child with his wife, Julie. Along the way, he also mingles at a Mensa conference, interviews Alex Trebek, takes a speed-reading seminar, and wonders whether any of this was a good idea in the first place. Predictably, his daily hours of reading begin to color the rest of his life:

Dundatree
This the Britannica defines as "the mythical country where large-footed dictators come from." Huh. That's a strange concept, I think to myself. I've never even heard of it.

The reason I've never heard of Dundatree is that...I dreamed it. I read so much that it's invaded my sleep. I can't escape those endless descriptions and dates, that little ten-point Times font text, the fancy gold embossing, not even when I close my eyes. And now I'm making up my own facts, which I'm worried I'll confuse with actual facts. (p. 66)

Although it took me a few years to get around to reading this, the concept appealed to me the first time I heard about it. Reading the encyclopedia is the sort of thing I would do. I haven't done it, naturally, but as a child I could spend a few hours at a time perusing a volume or two of the (1987?) World Book. Another thing I had in common with Jacobs - I'm sure I spent a good portion of my childhood with an over-inflated concept of my own intelligence. (Actually, it didn't start out that way. For the longest time, I thought that breezing through school with perfect marks without cracking a book was supposed to be the norm, and that I just had the unusual luck of being surrounded by imbeciles. Then I figured it out. And relished it. A lot.) Still, a good part of me would like nothing better than actually to be smarter than I ever imagined myself to be.

A few more telling (and bookish) excerpts:

• "The United Nations defines a book as a text that is at least forty-nine pages long." (p. 26)
  
  
• "Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes." (p. 55)
  
  
• "I like this image of Ezekiel and the scroll as a snack." (p. 89)
  
  
• "I like the story of how Marie de Gournay - a French intellectual at the time - fainted from excitement when she read Montaigne's work for the first time. She fainted from reading. What a great image. We've become far too jaded. I've been intrigued, bored, titillated, annoyed, amazed, but I've never even come close to fainting while reading any book." (p. 210)
  
  
• "I tell them they can write anywhere. If you have a job at the Gap, steal a few minutes and write some lines in the sweater section. No excuses. Hugh Lofting wrote Dr. Doolittle while in the trenches of World War I. Amid exploding grenades and gas masks and rats, he created a lovely little story about talking animals that he sent home to amuse his children. Be like Hugh. Write everywhere." (p. 334)