The Know-It-All
A.J. Jacobs
I do not so often read non-fiction. I am not a non-fiction kind of girl, I don’t think. I need a story and a plot and Fictional Devices and just – fiction. Fiction fills up my head and satisfies me in a way that non-fiction rarely ever does, even if it is a story that just happens to be all live nude truth. Don’t ask me why, because I’m not even entirely sure what it is.
It doesn’t stop me, whatever it is, from continuing to collect non fiction that sounds fascinating and interesting and must-read but that I often just somehow never manage finish. Which is another big difference between my fiction and non-fiction habits -- I will always, always finish a novel, no matter how much I hate it and it makes me clench my teeth and want everyone in the book to die (see: The Corrections). I might throw the book across the room with great and alarming force after I finish the final word, but I will get to that goddamn last word.
With non-fiction, the moment I start to wander is the moment the book gets set down, never to be picked up again. Anyone want a gently used copy of Darwin’s Ghost?
So it’s not entirely clear why I picked up The Know-It-All. Except that it sounded really fascinating, which is why I pick up all my doomed to be forgotten non-fiction.
It is entirely clear, however, that I loved it a lot. It was almost horribly sad, very frequently, and always very very funny, and it’s crammed with Interesting Facts and a whole lot of goofiness. A lot of its appeal was the narrator – the author – who decides that he’s going to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z which is nuts, and also kind of really sexy.
He is funny and a little crazy, self-deprecating and also really sincere about this quixotic quest of his and you’re doing that cheer the author along thing while you read the book, which is organized alphabetically, with his commentary on encyclopedia entries he’s reading, as well as his life – a thread runs through about his relationship to his wife, his family, trying to have a baby, and how he feels about his father, which is where a lot of the bittersweetness comes roaring through. He does a lot of thinking about why he’s doing this crazy thing, and what it means, and what all these facts can mean to his life or anyone’s life, and it’s fascinating. It might even be thought-provoking.
It feels, in the end, a little less complete and well fleshed out than it could be – as if the facts he’s relating become more important, way too frequently, than the story of his life he’s seeding in between entries, but I devoured this the way I would any novel, and I want to read his other books. Especially the one that compares jesus and elvis, because awesome.
I do not so often read non-fiction. I am not a non-fiction kind of girl, I don’t think. I need a story and a plot and Fictional Devices and just – fiction. Fiction fills up my head and satisfies me in a way that non-fiction rarely ever does, even if it is a story that just happens to be all live nude truth. Don’t ask me why, because I’m not even entirely sure what it is.
It doesn’t stop me, whatever it is, from continuing to collect non fiction that sounds fascinating and interesting and must-read but that I often just somehow never manage finish. Which is another big difference between my fiction and non-fiction habits -- I will always, always finish a novel, no matter how much I hate it and it makes me clench my teeth and want everyone in the book to die (see: The Corrections). I might throw the book across the room with great and alarming force after I finish the final word, but I will get to that goddamn last word.
With non-fiction, the moment I start to wander is the moment the book gets set down, never to be picked up again. Anyone want a gently used copy of Darwin’s Ghost?
So it’s not entirely clear why I picked up The Know-It-All. Except that it sounded really fascinating, which is why I pick up all my doomed to be forgotten non-fiction.
It is entirely clear, however, that I loved it a lot. It was almost horribly sad, very frequently, and always very very funny, and it’s crammed with Interesting Facts and a whole lot of goofiness. A lot of its appeal was the narrator – the author – who decides that he’s going to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z which is nuts, and also kind of really sexy.
He is funny and a little crazy, self-deprecating and also really sincere about this quixotic quest of his and you’re doing that cheer the author along thing while you read the book, which is organized alphabetically, with his commentary on encyclopedia entries he’s reading, as well as his life – a thread runs through about his relationship to his wife, his family, trying to have a baby, and how he feels about his father, which is where a lot of the bittersweetness comes roaring through. He does a lot of thinking about why he’s doing this crazy thing, and what it means, and what all these facts can mean to his life or anyone’s life, and it’s fascinating. It might even be thought-provoking.
It feels, in the end, a little less complete and well fleshed out than it could be – as if the facts he’s relating become more important, way too frequently, than the story of his life he’s seeding in between entries, but I devoured this the way I would any novel, and I want to read his other books. Especially the one that compares jesus and elvis, because awesome.
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