A.J. Jacobs decided to become smart by the simple expedient of reading the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA from cover to cover. It contained 44 million words, and the project took him a year. At the end of it, he may have been smarter, but as he describes in this comical narrative, he was also a pariah: people recoiled in horror when he began regaling them with his odd bits of offbeat knowledge. But at least he can take comfort in being one of the few people in the world who know everything there is to know about budgerigars, the Spanish-American War, and ancient East Asian music.
critical reviews
"[A] comic triumph....It is all enormous fun, educational even...with lots of arcane nuggets readers can casually drop on the unsuspecting...." - (Kirkus, 8/1/04)
"[A] comic triumph....It is all enormous fun, educational even...with lots of arcane nuggets readers can casually drop on the unsuspecting...." - (Kirkus, 8/1/04)
"[O]ne of the book's strongest parts is its laugh-out-loud humor. Jacobs's ability to juxtapose his quirky, sardonic wit with oddball trivia make this one of the season's most unusual books." - (Publishers Weekly, 7/12/04)
"[O]ne of the book's strongest parts is its laugh-out-loud humor. Jacobs's ability to juxtapose his quirky, sardonic wit with oddball trivia make this one of the season's most unusual books." - (Publishers Weekly, 7/12/04)
"What keeps the book from being no more than a series of alphabetically arranged humor columns is the leitmotif of becoming a man: Jacobs somehow turns the effort of reading 33,000 pages into the world's most passive Bildungsroman....But it's the stunt of the book itself that allows the funny, touching memoir to be so stuffed with nutritious bits of trivia that you feel smart for reading it." - Amanda L. Woodward (Time, 10/4/04)
"What keeps the book from being no more than a series of alphabetically arranged humor columns is the leitmotif of becoming a man: Jacobs somehow turns the effort of reading 33,000 pages into the world's most passive Bildungsroman....But it's the stunt of the book itself that allows the funny, touching memoir to be so stuffed with nutritious bits of trivia that you feel smart for reading it." - Amanda L. Woodward (Time, 10/4/04)
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"A. J. is an entertainment writer who decided to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. The whole thing, all the volumes, A to Zed, Alpha and Omega, knowledge without end.
And let's face it, if you read the entire Britannica, you'd write about it too, probably in whatever blog you keep. And that's how the book reads, too--like a particularly..." see more
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