The Know It All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

Written in the tone of Dave Barry or maybe a lower-brow P.J. O'Rourke, The Know It All recounts A.J. Jacobs's attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. I enjoyed this book and while this extremely negative NYT review is perhaps correct in a very literal way, it fails to capture the humor and wittiness of his sentences:

If the Britannica has taught me anything, it's to be more careful. I don't want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don't want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don't want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can't have "Jacobs" be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.

As Barry and O'Rourke have demonstrated, it can be difficult to sustain this style over an entire book, but Jacobs mostly does it.