Reading an entire encyclopedia is an absurd, almost impossible undertaking

Jacobs frames his central project — reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, roughly 33,000 pages, from "a-ak" to "zywiec" — as a comically extreme response to feeling intellectually inadequate compared to his encyclopedically well-read father, who had attempted and abandoned the same project decades earlier. The sheer scale of the undertaking becomes a running joke throughout the book, as he calculates and recalculates how many pages he must read daily to finish within a year, often falling behind and having to binge through dense volumes.

He's candid that the endeavor isn't really about efficient learning — a more targeted reading list would teach far more useful knowledge per hour invested — but about a specific, almost obsessive personal completionism, wanting to have genuinely read everything in one authoritative reference work rather than a curated selection.

The book's comic engine is watching a smart, self-aware person pursue a goal he half-recognizes is somewhat pointless, yet still worth doing for reasons beyond pure efficiency.

Takeaway: some worthwhile pursuits aren't justified by efficiency at all — the completionist challenge itself can be the point.