What a fun read! The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (gotta love the subtitle) by A.J. Jacobs is just a plain, funny read. It's about following the quest - the reading the the Encyclopaedia Britanica from A to Z.
The book is written sort of like an encyclopaedia itself, little ancedotes arranged in alphabetical order. Some are about the section he just read, some are about what people thought of him, his quest, or how he brought the section out into his life and some are just how that particular section related to his life. If the book had just been bon mots about what he had been reading then it would have been pretty boring but adding in the trials that he and his wife Julie were having trying to conceive thier first child and the relationship he had with his brother-in-law Jacobs makes a narrative out of reading the encyclopaedia.
I liked that he was trying to find outlets for the knowledge he was accumulating. He tried to get on Jeopardy but, because he'd interviewed Alex Trebeck, ended up on Who Wants to be a Millionaire instead. I liked that he often failed. There were points in the book that I wondered if things happened the way he wrote them or if he gave a spin on them to meet the characters he was trying to develop. I half expected that I'd get to the listing for pregnancy and find that his wife was expecting. I'm glad he wasn't that obvious if he shifted the events around to better follow his A to Z structure.
Being an admitted knowledge geek myself and having contemplated reading the entire encyclopaedia I really related to Jacobs. I found the book funny, entertaining and interesting. I really enjoyed it so I'm giving it a 5.
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