I’m reading The Know It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs for a book club I recently joined. I’ll attend my first meeting on Monday night. I totally won’t have the book read by then, though. I didn’t think this would be a book that I want to read repeatedly, so I tried to obtain it from the Davenport library, but my hold expired before I made it there. So, I requested the book again and finally picked it up from the Muscatine library last week. I think I’ve had the book for a little over a week now. I’m on page 167 out of 726. I’m going to write a review of the book, even though I am only about 1/7th of the way through it. Even though I generally like the book, I will have neither the time nor the inclination to finish it. Before I started the book club, I already had a list of 30 books that I needed to read. Now, with the book club, I’ll need to read an assigned book every month, too. So, with no time to finish, I’m reduced to the bad form of writing a review of a book I have not completely read. Oh well.
It’s actually too bad that I didn’t have time to finish this book. A.J. Jacobs is a really interesting writer. I like the way he phrases things, and a lot of his thoughts/insights clarify my own. I find him really funny, too. He’s not like David Sedaris funny – more sarcastic and dry – totally my type of humor.
Here the book’s premise. Basically, A.J. feels as if he has not done anything noteworthy with his life. This feeling is compounded by the fact that his father has written 24 law books and is super smart and his brother-in-law is a brilliant condescending bastard. A.J., while obviously a very smart person, is more interested in entertainment/pop culture than the subtle nuances of the law. So, to redeem himself and bolster his self-confidence, he starts to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) from A to Zed.
The book is written rather like an encyclopedia. A.J. picks excerpts from the EB that he finds particularly interesting, or that he can at least make some interesting observations about. Some of them are funny (see baculum), some of them are sad (see Chang and Eng), and some of them are just truly bizarre (see augury). This is an unusual tack to take with a book; it makes the book easy to pick up and read when one only has a couple of minutes, but it doesn’t really keep the reader engaged, as there is no plot progression to speak of – at least not one that I’ve seen yet.
One of the reasons I really identify with this author is because of his struggle with knowing that while he is a smart, talented person, he has yet to make his mark on the world. His life will come and go, and the world will be no different for it. That’s a concept that I struggle with a lot, too. I’m smart (ish). In high school, I seemed to have a lot of potential. Heck, I was even voted “Most Likely to Have An Encyclopedia Page Written About Her.” While my daily life is very happy and pleasant, no one will ever find it interesting enough to write an encyclopedia entry about it, and if they did, not many would find it interesting enough to spend 5 minutes of their lives reading it. It’s just rather sad when one comes face-to-face with his or her own anonymity. So, back to my original point, I can totally see where A.J. is coming from, and I’m glad that by him writing this book he’s gained some notoriety, for a little bit at least.
So, I’m glad that I’ve read the first 167 pages. Maybe when I get done with my current list of 30 books, I’ll circle back and finish this one. I wish A.J. the best, and I hope that this book someday warrants him and entry in the EB.
