Reviewed by Tabitha Thompson

Need an impressive word for your next Scrabble game but too busy to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica yourself? Just follow A.J. Jacobs as he takes readers through his own EB readathon in The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. The chapters are each a letter of the alphabet, with entries under each word, but this is no Cliff Notes version of an encyclopedia. Along with highlighting some of Britannica’s unusual facts and all-but forgotten historical occurrences, the entries detail life according to A.J.

Because of its alphabetized-entry format, the book is a bit episodic—making it, dare I say, the perfect bathroom companion (entries run from a few sentences to a few pages).  But it is more enjoyable and surprising than one might expect, both because Jacobs’ wry humor is on every page (like a stand-up routine, tidbits of fact are followed by a wisecrack or self-effacing anecdote), and because the information provided in any given section may or may not directly correspond to its heading.  Take, for example, Jacobs’ rumination on cheese knives under the heading “missing links” or his list of Top Ten Ways to Get Yourself Mentioned in the EB, which is entered under the heading “eunuchs”:

1. Get beheaded, 2. Explore the Arctic, 3. Write some poems, 4. Become a botanist—preferably a Scandinavian botanist, 5. Get yourself involved in commedia dell’arte, 6. Win the Nobel Prize, 7. Get castrated (men only), 8. Design a font, 9. Become a mistress to a monarch (ladies only), 10. Become a liturgical vestment.

What keeps the reader turning the pages are the increasingly cohesive stories about his and his wife’s struggle with infertility, his desperate need to measure up to his accomplished father’s life, the effect of his expanding knowledge on dinner conversations, why Daniel Fahrenheit pisses him off, and his search for meaning among the knowledge. That, and, “well, there’s always ‘zywiec’ to look forward to.”