The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs

I personally have never been into reading biographies. But something about the following book made me pick it up without second thoughts. One of the most hilarious accounts from one man with a strange passion to accomplish reading 44 million words of all 32 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Part biography, Part trivia source, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, by Esquire editor (and NPR contributor) A. J. Jacobs, is one of the most pioneering ways of writing one's biography. Witty and unusually crafted (all of 369 pages), this book is a must read.



SAMPLE EXCERPT:

Here's a funny bit about the author trying to apply his new found knowledge in real life:

It's Valentine's Day. We don’t make a big deal about this holiday in the Schoenberg-Jacobs Household. We were both single for so many years that we have residual resentment from all of the date-free Valentine/s days we suffered through. It's a cruel concept, Valentine's Day. It’s as if they had a holiday to celebrate rich people or attractive people. Miserable and alone? Sorry, this isn’t your day. So in a mini protest, Julie and I spend the night at home. We order in Thai Food and watch some romantic TV- the scene of the coroner on CSI removing the pancreas was particularly enchanting.
Cards, however, are allowed. Julie gives me a lovely one about how there last five years with me have been the best in her life. In response, I gift her my card, which I'd typed that day at work, hovering around the printer as the paper came out. Don’t want this one leaking out.
Julie reads it aloud.
"You make me suffer Tachycardia" she reads. She cocks her head.
"It's when someone has an irregularly fast heartbeat", I say. "I'm just saying you make my heart beat faster. Keep Going"
"I'm glad we practiced assortative mating together", she says. She looks at me again.
"Its when you pick a mate who's similar to you. Like fat people mate with fat people. I'm saying we're similar"
Julie looks back at the printout.
"You are worth much more than twenty spears", she says.
"Thats the traditional bride price among Africa 's Azande Tribe"
She finishes up: “You are my gal - and I don’t mean the unit of measurement"
"Yeah, a gal is a change of rate in motion of one inch per second per second. Or one centimeter. That’s right, one centimeter. Anyway, you really are my gal. So what do you think?"
"A Little show-offy", she says, “but the sentiments are nice".
I'm relieved. It could have backfired, but she seems to have enjoyed it. Which emboldens me to tell her that, though the encyclopedia is taking a bunch of my time and putting a little strain on our marriage, it's made me realize how lucky I am. There just aren't many happy marriages in the encyclopedia. Marriages in history are loveless obligations, something to suffer through in between affairs. The French, of course, raised out-of-wedlock sex to perfection, even creating an official position for mistress to the king. I knew that kings had mistresses, but I didn’t know that they practically had business cards and an office.
A surprising number of marriages are unconsummated, and an even greater number end in bloodshed. Once in a while, maybe every couple of hundred pages, I read about a happy marriage. But even these are often tainted with oddness - as in the unlikely union of brilliant poet William Blake and an illiterate peasant woman. I hope they had amazing sex, because I can't imagine the conversations were too lively. I tell Julie the Blake story, adding that I'm glad she's not illiterate, which she takes in her stride.

Life of Pi: by Yann Martel

Imaginative, Adventurous and great story telling make this award-winning (Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002) novel a must read. The story about Piscine Molitor Patel or Pi Patel, son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, and his pursuit to survive for 227 days in an open boat in the Pacific in the company of an adult 450-pound Bengal tiger (named Richard Parker). Its a book with universal appeal (although it looks like a children's book on the surface) and has a much deeper adult message, in between the narrative. Touching on topics ranging from religion to faith to zoology and life, Yann Martel is witty while being profound.

SAMPLE EXCERPT:

Richard Parker was so named because of a clerical error. A panther was terrorizing the Khulna district of Bangladesh, just outside the Sundarbans. It had recently carried off a little girl. All that was found of her was a tiny hand with a henna pattern on the palm and a few plastic bangles. She was the seventh person killed in two months by the marauder. And it was growing bolder. The previous victim was a man who had been attacked in broad daylight in his field. The beast dragged him off into the forest, where it ate a good part of his head, the flesh off his right leg and all his innards. His corpse was found hanging in the fork of a tree. The villagers kept a watch nearby that night, hoping to surprise the panther and kill it; but it never appeared. The Forest Department hired a professional hunter. He set up a small, hidden platform in a tree near a river where two of the attacks had taken place. A goat was tied to a stake on the river's bank. The hunter waited several nights. He assumed the panther would be an old, wasted male with worn teeth, incapable of catching anything more difficult than a human. But it was a sleek tiger that stepped into the open one night. A female with a single cub. The goat bleated. Oddly, the cub, who looked to be about three months old, paid little attention to the goat. It raced to the water's edge, where it drank eagerly. Its mother followed suit. Of hunger and thirst, thirst is the greater imperative. Only once the tiger had quenched her thirst did she turn to the goat to satisfy her hunger. The hunter had two rifles with him: one with real bullets, the other with immobolizing darts. This animal was not the man-eater, but so close to human habitation she might pose a threat to the villagers, especially as she was with cub. He picked up the gun with the darts. He fired as the tiger was about to fell the goat. The tiger reared up and snarled and raced away. But immobilizing darts don't bring on sleep gently, like a good cup of tea; they knock out like a bottle of hard liquor straight up. A burst of activity on the animal's part makes it act all the faster. The hunter called his assistants on the radio. They found the tiger about two hundred yards from the river. She was still conscious. Her back legs had given away and her balance on her front legs was woozy. When the men got close, she tried to get away but could not manage it. She turned on them, lifting a paw that was meant to kill. It only made her lose her balance. She collapsed and Pondicherry Zoo had two new tigers. The cub was found in a bush close by, meowing with fear. The hunter, whose name was Richard Parker, picked it up with his bare hands and, remembering how it had rushed to drink in the river, baptized it Thirsty. But the shipping clerk at the Howrah train station was evidently a man both befuddled and deligent. All the papers we recieved with the cub clearly stated that its name was Richard Parker, that the hunter's first name was Thirsty and that his family name was None Given. Father had had a good chuckle over the mix-up and Richard Parker's name had stuck.
I don't know if Thirsty None Given ever got the man-eating panther.