A.J. Jacobs: The Know-It-All (review)

Years ago, when I lived in a rented apartment, I wanted to get a pet. Dogs and cats were not allowed but to my surprise I discovered that rabbits were classified as fish and/or birds and were perfectly okay to have. So I got a rabbit (and two more – I love rabbits!). I’ve always found the ‘rabbits are fish’ classification strange but by reading this book, I’ve discovered there’s a precedence for this. Apparently, at some point in history monks were not allowed to eat meat on Fridays. What did they do? They decided that baby rabbits are really … wait for it… fish, of course, and therefore they could be eaten on Fridays. So apparently this way of thinking of rabbits as fish is nothing new. Interesting what you can learn from reading a book about a guy reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica.

As the blog name might suggest, I really like bunnies. So of course I also enjoyed what he wrote about the Fibonacci Sequence because Fibonacci figured out the sequence based on the reproduction of bunnies… Yes, I know. It’s a bit weird but interesting!

I was also fascinated by his attempts to get public recognition as the world’s smartest man by participating on Jeopardy or Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He succeeds in getting on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? where he doesn’t do too good. But that’s part of the backstory of the book – what is true knowledge? What is wisdom? Is the endless collecting of facts truly knowledge? He doesn’t give a final answer to this but he does get many associations to what he’s read when he goes about his daily life and to me at least, that is a good thing because it gives your life more depth when you can connect it to the lives of other people, other cultures, natural science, philosophy etc.

Overall, this is an interesting book and I’m really fascinated by how he is able to write an interesting book based on reading the Encyclopedia. Even though what he finds fascinating, isn’t always what I would have found fascinating – he has more the mindset of a teenage boy than I do – it’s still amusing and I was very well entertained.

However, it did get a bit repetitive. Like the beauty patches from France was mentioned twice in the book – even with the same details. Where’s the editor? He also repeats himself from Drop Dead Healthy – or rather, it’s the other way around, since this book was published earlier. I just listened to Drop Dead Healthy first. It seems in some ways that A.J. doesn’t expect people to read more than one of his books since he uses the exact same details in his books. Also, I’m really not sure  if it’s correct to use Alexander the Great as an example of Roman warfare – as far as I know, Alexander was not Roman…

I listened to the audio version of this book. My first issue with it was that it wasn’t narrated by A.J. Jacobs himself and since I had just finished listening to Drop Dead Healthy which A.J. did narrate, this annoyed me. Especially since this is a biography/memoir. It feels weird when you know the voice of the author, and you have heard him talk about his family, to suddenly listen to another man talk about the same family – in the same way. However, when I got used to Geoffrey Cantor’s voice and narration, it worked okay for me.

But my biggest issue with the audio book was that between each letter of the Encyclopedia, they play a brief jazz tune, maybe 5 seconds. This is extremely annoying! What’s that about? I’m listening to a book – I don’t want to have it interrupted by music bits that have nothing to do with what I’m listening to. And especially not bad annoying music!

Reading this book makes me want to tackle a similar project of my own. But what? Frederick Copleston’s History of Philosophy in 11 volumes? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? All novels by Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King? Not sure which – I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

• Title: The Know-It-All. One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
• Author: A.J. Jacobs
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster
• Year: 2005
• Pages: 389 pages
• Length: 14 hrs 47 min
• Narrated by: Geoffrey Cantor
• Source: Own Collection (Audible)
• Stars: 4 stars out of 5

Related posts:

• A.J. Jacobs: Drop Dead Healthy (review)