- Name: Stuff you should know: An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things
- Author: Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant with Nils Parker
- Genre: Non Fiction/Misc. Knowledge
- Book Post No. : 54
- What is it about? : Have you ever wondered about random things like those cyanide pills that movie characters take when caught? or about the Jersey Devil? or maybe the history of guns? This book takes up subjects like that and presents trivia and information about them. It has a variety of subjects with no clear classification or criteria for selection. Maybe the only criteria is that it has to be interesting. It ranges from the types of facial hair to the history of Income Tax.
- How I came to read it? : I was randomly browsing books in the library when I stumbled across this book. The chapter about how people respond when they are hiking, got me hooked and I borrowed it.
- Did I like it?: This was a ‘meh’ read for me. I usually only read books after careful selection so most of the books that I write about here on my blog are good. The ones that aren’t up to my liking I stop reading them as soon as I feel they are not worth my time. This book fell somewhere in between. Not as bad as to drop it but not too good either. Many of the subjects chosen, I thought, weren’t that interesting like the one about facial hair. And the book starts off with this topic. I do not understand the logic behind this. There were far more interesting topics in the book that the authors could have started off with. For example, the best one of the lot, the chapter about Kamikaze pilots. That was a fun read. Then the one about Cyanide pills was also great! Another annoying part of the reading experience of this book was the footnotes. There are so many of them and many of them were just unnecessary. I understand the authors were trying to make this a humorous read but the constant footnotes were just breaking my reading flow. I got so annoyed at one point that I simply stopped reading the footnotes. Some of the jokes made me laugh but most of them just irritated me.
- Positives: Short chapters, can be read in no particular order, good for casual readers
- Negatives: Super annoying footnotes, not that interesting writing
- Any other personal notes, observations, fun facts etc.: Below is the best page from the whole book:
