50-59: Serial Readers

My trip to 50-59 contained a little more angst than usual; the topic is Magazines, and the pickings are slim. Technically, collected volumes of the New Yorker should count, I guess, but they live in the Periodicals room, so all I had in front of me was memoirs of magazine employees, deconstructions of the social import of assorted publications, and the history of various rags. I ended up with Shocking True Story, which is the history of the country's first celebrity gossip sheet, Confidential. I'm not hurting myself. Sure, the history of Hollywood in the 40s and 50s touches on everything from unionization to the Red Scare, but the chapters are short, and each one starts with a (surprisingly literate) excerpt from an original article. Did Rita Hayworth neglect her children? Did Desi cheat on Lucy? By now, with most of the participants safely located where what anybody says about them can no longer ruin their lives, it's pure entertainment. And the 50's definition of "shocking" is a little different from ours, so it's rather mild entertainment at that.

PS: Why are so many famous people so spectacularly miserable? I don't think anybody's ever figured it out, but an occasional reminder that the grass is not in fact greener is always welcome.

40-49: The Category Formerly Known As Biographies

40-49: There is no 17th floor. There is no Miss Zarves. This, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes#Class_000_.E2.80.93_Computer_science.2C_information_.26_general_works) is where biographies used to live. Now it is waiting for someone to invent a new form of information gathering so it can represent that. There's a goal for you: be the guy who starts a trend that ends up in the 40s of the Dewey Decimal System.

Don't Know Much About....: The Know-It-All by AJ Jacobs

So AJ Jacobs set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. This did not, as it turned out, make him a complete know-it-all, because, as his somewhat disappointing experience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire demonstrated, he kept forgetting stuff. It did, however, increase what I suspect was already his propensity to interject random facts into conversations in an effort to show off his knowledge (Personally, I prefer the vocabulary strategy). He spent a lot of time worrying about whether all his newfound knowledge was making him a better person or at least helping him solve real-life problems, and related a few incidents where it was. But Jacobs' real genius lies in his ability to make his daily life as an encyclopedia reader, editor of Esquire, husband and aspiring father hilarious and relatable. Even though this book is structured as a miscellany, it was a page-turner. Recommended.
 

30-39: Books of Lists

The 30's are dedicated to trivia and compendiums: almanacs, the Guinness Book of World Records, etc. Schott's Miscellany, but not John Hodgman's Areas of My Expertise,which is a fake almanac found in the humor section. Do not envy the life of a cataloguer who has to make those distinctions! But all is not lost, because AJ Jacobs was here and left us The Know-It-All. I loved The Year of Living Biblically, so I'm fairly excited about this, too. It's just that I also have juicy comic science fiction by Tom Holt and A. Lee Martinez on the stack, so it's taking some commitment to settle into a book that has a chapter for each letter of the alphabet instead of multidimensional travel or bug-eyed monsters...