The Know-It-All

Jacobs recounts his year-long personal project of reading all 32 volumes and roughly 33,000 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z, structured as a memoir that alternates entertaining trivia gleaned from the entries with the personal fallout of the project — strain on his marriage, competitive one-upping of his brilliant brother-in-law, and a running, half-serious quest to qualify for the quiz show Jeopardy!. His argument, delivered mostly through comic self-deprecation, is that accumulating vast quantities of disconnected facts doesn't actually make someone wise or even particularly competent at applying knowledge usefully, even as the pursuit itself proves oddly meaningful.

It matters because the book gently skewers the idea that raw information equals intelligence, using Jacobs's own increasingly absurd trivia recitations at dinner parties as a comic illustration of knowledge divorced from wisdom or social usefulness — a distinction that matters more, not less, in an age of instant search-engine access to endless facts. The memoir format also makes an enormous, dry reference work surprisingly entertaining by filtering it through one anxious, funny, self-aware narrator's year.

Who should read it

Trivia lovers, fans of comic memoir, and anyone who enjoys learning small surprising facts about a huge range of topics will enjoy this book's format. It also appeals to readers interested in a lighthearted meditation on the difference between knowing facts and being wise.

About the author

A.J. Jacobs is an American author and journalist known for immersive, first-person experiment memoirs, including The Year of Living Biblically; The Know-It-All, published in 2004, chronicles his year reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica in full.