GeekReads

What goes in, must come out...

Purpose designed to be read on the bog, Trivia for the Toilet comes with a “splashproof, easy-wipe cover”, and offers amusing little tidbits of information for you to read while passing, er… time.

There’s enough to keep one entertained throughout many visits to the throne, with plenty of amusing anecdotes, fun stats, examples of nature’s quirkiness, and just plain randomness, such as a list of the many words that Eskimos have for different types of snow.

In the midst of these, I noticed a few that are based on popular urban myths, e.g. “A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no-one knows why” (debunked)* – so I was never 100% sure that the other “facts”, however funny or interesting, aren’t also incorrect.

If you can find it on the cheap, or need a gift idea and couldn’t be bothered thinking of something better (e.g. a Kris Kringle for a colleague you don’t know very well), Trivia for the Toilet is just the thing.

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* And on an unrelated note, the duck quack’s echo is also the topic of one of my favourite pictures – the duck looks so happy to be having a conversation with the researcher. It makes me laugh every time:

Testing to see whether a duck's quack echoes

Another classic Paul Kidby Discworld book cover

Despite the tragic early onset of Alzheimers, Unseen Academicals shows that popular fantasy author Terry Pratchett is still in top form. He’s got the “diamond in the rough” schtick down to a T, but the difference is that at the end of each story, those polished diamonds don’t disappear off into obscurity – they sparkle on in subsequent novels, imbuing the Discworld with an extreme richness (pun intended).

The 37th novel in the Discworld series(!), Academicals continues the recurring theme of the modernisation of the capital city of Ankh-Morpork. Recent books have seen A-M gain a postal service, a telecommunications system known as “the clacks”, a shiny new banking system, its own currency, and now, football (soccer) and, er… a high-end fashion industry*.

Pratchett still has the touch, and the book offers unnervingly accurate insight into the human psyche, as the plot bores deeply into the inner workings of players, fans, and of course – because it’s soccer – hooligans. The British humour, Flintstones-style take on the modern world, and the satire of fantasy conventions are all exquisitely funny for sure, but beneath the veneer of slapstick he hits hard at issues such as taking the ambiguity of dwarven genders and putting them into the context of the high-end fashion industry, to explore ideas of sexual identity and individual choice, without speaking of sex whatsoever (although there’s more sexual innuendo than usual for Discworld novel as far as I can recall).

The "Jolly Sailor Tobacco Football Cards" depicting characters from Unseen Academicals, available separately and also illustrated by Paul Kidby

Rather than following the escapades of a single character, several plot threads weave their way in and around of each other:

• The wizards of Unseen University, who need to put together a football team or risk losing the significant financial benefits of a bequest that funds their lackadaisical academic lifestyle
• Trevor Likely, trying to grow out of the shadow of his late father Dave – a legend who scored a record number of goals the historical game of “foot-the-ball”
• Nutt, a genteel so-called goblin who discovers the truth about his enigmatic past
• Glenda Sugarbean, the homely head of the university’s Night Kitchen, and her ditsy, comely friend Juliet (“Jools”) Stollop whose modelling debut (heavily armoured and wearing a dwarf beard) leaves the fashion world abuzz and has them trying to find the mysterious “Jewels”
• The dwarf Madame Sharn, head of the fashion label Shatta, and her flamboyant assistant Pepe, at the launch of their new line of micromail.
• The ins-and-outs of the “Shove” – the collective of football followers, being that when they get together to watch a game, nobody can really see anything and all that happens is a lot of shoving.

… and of course the welcome appearance of recurring characters such as Havelock Vetinari, the seemingly omniscient Patrician of Ankh-Morpork; and brief cameos by Death, and Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler.

What I love most about Pratchett even more than the insights, is his mastery of the written form, and his ability to ignore the conventions of language that we take for granted, as when one of the characters in the book is described as being full of “charisn’tma”. And like most of the other Discworld novels, he pushes the boundaries of typography by using bolds, italics, font-sizes, Death’s dialogue ALWAYS IN CAPS and more, to eke every bit of meaning possible out of the words on the page.

To confuse my sporting metaphors, Unseen Academicals adds another home run to an already impressive scoreboard, and I seriously hope that Pratchett hits a couple more before the end of his innings.

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* For this reason, if you’re new to Discworld I don’t recommend starting with this book – check out the reading order in Wikipedia for more details.

The cover of The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs

In his A Short History of Nearly Everything, the always affable Bill Bryson proved that you don’t need to be a fact geek to enjoy reading about facts. That book was an enjoyable romp from the past to the present and it was with that in mind that I picked up A.J. Jacobs’s The Know-It-All (One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World) from the library.

Jacobs is a senior editor of Esquire magazine, and through some kind of epiphany regarding the decline of his intellect as a result of working in mainstream journalism, he made it his mission to acquire all the knowledge in the world – or at least as much of it as is contained in the world’s most eminent publication, the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Sadly, it’s bad news from there onwards. He goes through the encyclopedia, picking out random entries to comment on, occasionally interspersed with a running commentary about his experiences trying to apply his project to real life, such as joining Mensa and going on Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire. The jokes are sometimes quite funny, and I frequently found myself doing the same thing as the author, which is to bug my wife with the odd factoids that I got from reading during inopportune moments.

The endless deluge of facts though, however amusingly rendered, made the book a tedious read at times since not every single one of them tickled my fancy as it did the author’s. I like to think that I have a pretty broad sense of humour, but sometimes he tries a little bit too hard and ends up with a head-scratcher, e.g.

Las Vegas
Mormons were the first settlers. Not sure Joseph Smith would approve fo today’s topless showgirls and liquor. Though he would like the volcano at the Mirage. Everybody likes the volcano.

Jacobs also manages to sneak in a good chunk of autobiography, particularly the recurring theme of him and his wife’s attempts at trying to conceive. The way in which he slots these into the rigid alphabetic order of the entries is sometimes deft, but more often ham fisted. “Paris” gets 6 lines, but “character writer” gets almost 4 pages, and Matthew Perry (no, not Chandler from Friends) gets 4.5 because he spends almost the entire entry talking about his attempt to get onto Millionaire.

Know-It-All wasn’t my first preference of Jacobs’s books. He did a follow-up book called The Year of Living Biblically (One man’s humble quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible), the premise of which I thought might be amusing, but this one just happened to be on the shelf when Jenny and I went there to pick up some DVDs. Given his lacklustre performance I’m slightly less keen to pick it up now.

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Buy The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs… or don’t, and get A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson instead.