Subway Reads: Recommended

" You can't judge a book by its cover," they say. Absurd! Of course you can, and do, every time you go into a bookstore or search online or sit across from someone on the train. And sometimes your guesses are right on. And other times, well, who could have imagined that Kierkegaard would be such a blowhard?

But what if there really were an instant snapshot of a book -- the ones and zeroes of its brain? Ah, the index. A much-overlooked and often ignored gauge of content and organization. A good index is simultaneously informative, clever, and not too intense. It is the hot graduate student to your freshman year psych class, the cliffs notes to high school kids everywhere, the (dare I say it?) wikipedia to the Internet obsessed.

The best way, then, to describe the pleasure that is reading The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs is to begin at the end. Page 371 starts us off with "accents, glottal stop in;" rushes us on to "air travel, ethical dilemnas in;" "animals: sleazeball behaviors of;" and "Aztecs, Planet of the
Apes idea lifted from." Of course these are just some of the 'A's.  On subsequent pages we are directed to "Charleses, aids to memorizing of;" "compulsions, unkickable;" "Descartes, Rene: cross-eyed-women fetish of;" and of course "Encyclopedia Britannica: admirable anality of." I'd go on, but I'm only through the 'K's, and I'd hate to spy a spoiler.

The book is an alphabetical journey through the world as we know it--seen through the gaze of that venerable of all sources, the Encyclopedia Britannica. A. J. Jacobs writes of his struggle to read it cover to cover, but most importantly writes of his struggle to place himself within the content on its pages. Where does a one-time Entertainment Weekly journalist find himself in the grand scheme of things, anyway?

Jacobs is nothing if not self-deprecating; and, at his best, his dry wit and observations about himself and others will have your train-mates studiously avoiding eye contact and switching seats at the next stop. (Apparently, middle-aged businessmen do not like to be squished up against people who giggle to themselves at seemingly random intervals on a crowded train. Nonetheless, it did make for a pleasant commute on Friday...) Jacobs is funny, irrevent, and a marvelous writer. And though I'm not there yet, I have a feeling that 'Z' will be a letter I can't afford to miss. In the meantime, a quick breakdown of this week's Subway Reads.