'I could talk confidently about the doughnut-eating Homer,' admits Jacobs, 'but I'd forgotten all about the blind guy who wrote long poems.' He also seems to have forgotten everything he might once have known about history, geography, science and not patronising his readers. Jacobs realises that he has suffered what he calls a 'long, slow slide into dumbness' while working as an editor at Esquire magazine, where he gets to make decisions such as 'whether we should run the cleavage shot or the butt shot of the actress of the month', the kind of useless media responsibility that is enough to convince just about anyone of their own utter waste-of-spaceness and stupidity. Some of his quips and asides are worthy even of Woody Allen: 'In general, I don't just see the glass as half empty, I see the glass as half empty and the water as teeming with microbes and the rim as smudged and the liquid as evaporating quickly.' 'Reading the Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system, one with no shortage of shows about Sumerian cities.' The Know-It-All is a jape of a book in that recent popular tradition of jape-books - that Travelling-with-a-Fridge-Visiting-Bars-with-My-Name-Having-Sex-With-Lots-of-Strangers type of thing - and it's better than most, with Jacobs working the average sort of shtick very effectively, coming across as a slightly younger and Jewish Bill Bryson. In The Know-It-All, the American journalist AJ Jacobs chooses this, the wrist-heavy route through his own early mid-life crisis, setting out to read the entire 33,000 pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Another way to claim and extend our sense of infinite possibilities is to read like a demon to obtain the heights of learning, of culture and of knowledge.

The know it all by aj jacobs