I found a book I liked!

I always seem to put caveats on my book reviews -- don't buy it, just borrow it; good, if you like that sort of thing; overall waste of paper but some redeeming qualities -- but I found a book I genuinely like. A lot.

It sounds absolutely awful at first, so bear with me. The Know It All's premise is that the author, a 30something year old writer named A.J., decides his brain is decaying. He writes for Esquire, and works with Entertainment, so his adult knowledge base is more along the lines of Britney's escapades than Caesar's. He's also got something of a complex about keeping up with his family's intellectual pursuits. Before A.J. was born, his father tried to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, A-Z, cover to cover. He stopped in the Bs. A.J. decides that he needs to beat Dad and actually finish the books.

The format is off-putting if you flip through the book; it's set up like an encyclopedia. The first chapter begins with a-ak and explains what it is (style of music) and a little about it. Um...great? I could look this up myself, you know...But A.J. weaves a story into his "Best of Britannica" entries.

The plot's pretty simple: Average Joe (who happens to edit at Esquire, damn him) is trying to have a baby with his wife. It's not working. It's turning into an obsession. Simultaneously, he's trying to prepare for being a maybe-eventually-father by re-learning all the stuff he's forgotten, figuring out answers to all the questions the maybe-eventually-kid might ask, and make some kind of bizarre peace with his family, even though their accomplishments often make him feel like the intellectual equal of a tapeworm.

And it's funny. Did I mention that I approve of the funny? He's got a very dry, self-deprecating wit, as well as a slightly immature streak. I could see a lot of us acting like this in 10 years or so.

As dweeby as it sounds, this book reminded me of educational theory. The early parts are more cut and dried, show and tell pieces on the interesting entries. As the book progresses, A.J. begins comparing the entries, connecting them to his life (enter the plot), and evaluating them for accuracy and bias. This is kind of cool because most of modern education is based on Bloom's Taxonomy, which ranks ways of "knowing" information with the level of understanding it implies. (Memorizing and reciting requires no understanding, since you're just spouting it back; evaluating implies that you understand it well enough to analyze the whole fact and the fact in context.) Whether or not it was deliberate, the author kind of climbed the pyramid of Bloom's Taxonomy over the course of the book.

The whole thing is also a huge study in prior knowledge. Prior knowledge, in education, is the idea that you need to build on information and cannot understand something in a vacuum. (Yes, duh, but we spent about a month talking about this at Hopkins. ::facepalm::) So, if there was a brand-new, never before seen paper on a massive development in math, I would get way less out of it than Josh, because he would have the prior knowledge to make some sense of it, even if the information in the paper was completely alien.

Likewise, in the book, the earlier entries are usually somewhat disconnected, as the author doesn't have a huge knowledge base (or is very rusty). As it goes on, he develops a massive knowledge of trivia and events, and so he's better able to link and absorb facts. Kind of cool.

On a less intellectual note: Atelier Iris is eating a lot of my time; knitting and cooking have the rest. There is no Mairead, only yarn.