What a Know-It-All.

The nonfiction book I've selected to read isn't structured like most books; in fact, it's set up to be like the very books people avoid reading unless they absolutely have to. I am reading The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs in which he writes about doing this exact thing people don't do: read the Britannica Encyclopedia "from A to Z -- or more precisely, a-ak to zwyiec."  The book is arranged to look like the encyclopedia: the word is listed followed by a fairly sized entry, but instead of writing up definitions for certain words, he records his thoughts and relates it to things currently going on in his life.

Aside from being a New York Times Best-seller, Jacobs' main job is being an editor at Esquire magazine. His reason, he claims, for taking on this grand quest was because he finds that, since he'd graduated from Brown University, his IQ was going down, he realized that he'd done nothing significant with his life as a college graduate, and because he believed he was going through "a long, slow slide into dumbness." He refers to this task as his "humble quest to become the smartest person in the world." 

In addition to sprinkles of worthy life lessons, the best thing about this book is it's perennial hilarity. Thus far, there hasn't been a chapter in which I haven't giggled to myself because of something he said. I remember fondly when, after discovering its existence in the encyclopedia, he found a loophole to get into the Mensa group for extremely intelligent people. After getting tested to see if he was qualified to be a member, he found that he didn't qualify, and was told to just be glad he was already a member. I had to stop reading for a while to allow myself a moment to laugh.

I'm guessing he's just a funny guy in general because when I looked him up online, I couldn't help but laugh at the end of reading this biography, or rather, autobiography of himself. I am looking forward to finishing this book and expect to have a larger inventory of random knowledge upon reading zywiec, the final entry.