The Know-It-All (and other books I’ve recently read)

Last September, I started reading a book called “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.” I stumbled across it at the Green Valley Book Fair and thought it seemed interesting, so I bought it for four bucks and started reading it… until I soon set it aside, unfinished. A few weeks ago, I picked it back up again, but since I couldn’t remember what I had read the first time, I had to start all over at the beginning.

This evening, I finally finished it. To give you an idea of just how long it took me to get through it, I started reading it before Tim and I ever went on our first date — and we’ve been married almost four months. Of course, I read more than a dozen other books during that time, so it’s not that I gave up reading when I met Tim.

The cover of “The Know-It-All” claims that it’s a National Bestseller, and it’s written by A.J. Jacobs, who wrote the recently popular book “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,” but honestly, I struggled to get through it. It’s basically one man’s story of the year he spent reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, and like the Britannica, the book is organized alphabetically by topic. (You can read an excerpt on the author’s website.) The book is full of interesting information, and he managed to weave in plenty of humor and personal stories, but nothing really compelled me to read further. I could have stopped at any point and not felt that I was going to miss anything — except the satisfaction of finishing what I started.

Perhaps the most interesting fact I gleaned is that the scoring system for the game of Boggle is actually the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibo-what, you ask? The Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers that I learned about as a kid when I watched an episode of Mathnet on the PBS show Square One. It later came up in a high school math class. Each of the numbers is the sum of the two preceding numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The Fibonacci numbers appear in both math and nature (check out the Wikipedia entry for details), but I love knowing that the Fibonacci sequence also shows up in Boggle.

So… while The Know-It-All was an interesting book, it isn’t necessarily one that I would recommend — although if you DO want to read it, I’d be happy to give you my copy.

Last month I set a goal of reading 1000 books during the remainder of my lifetime. I have no idea if that will really happen, but I’ve read four books so far. Two of those were “Sleepwalk with Me” by comedian Mike Birbiglia and “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez. I actually read an autographed copy of Mike Birbiglia’s book, since Tim and I each got one for “free” when we went to a performance by him back in October. (Are you reading this via a Google Alert, Mike? I hope so.)

So that’s the scoop. I haven’t decided yet what I’ll read next, but I have a stack of unread books that is probably as high as the stack of Britannica volumes would be, so I should probably pick one of those…