My encyclopedia arrived and it is glorious
This is the 2024 World Book Encyclopedia - the only English-language encyclopedia that still comes in a print edition.
The 2025 version is also available, and has some very cool Jazz Age-themed artwork. But I chose the 2024 because I fell in love with this spacescape. (Added bonus: it's on sale.)
I bought this encyclopedia for three reasons:
In an era where "truth" and "facts" are increasingly treated as up for grabs, I wanted a compendium of generally-agreed-upon facts about the world around me.
I wanted that compendium to be something I controlled completely and that could not be easily deleted or misplaced.
I want to read it again.
"Again" isn't exactly right. I have never actually read the entire World Book before.
I have read the entire 1964 Encyclopedia Britannica, though. I read it the summers of 1993 and 1994. I lived half an hour from the nearest town and too far from anything or anyone I knew to ride my bike. My parents worked. We didn't have Internet access (we didn't even have touch-tone phone service until 1998).
I didn't understand a lot of what I read then. But I remember very much enjoying the experience, and I would like to do it again.
My friends say that blogging the experience of reading the encyclopedia again would be "just the right amount of weird" and "extremely nerdy but that's a feature, not a bug."
I have in fact read AJ Jacobs' The Know-It-All, his memoir about reading the 2012 Britannica. A friend sent it to me years ago, assuming it would be the kind of book I would like.
Full disclosure: I did not actually like it. It felt far too gimmicky. It utterly fails to respect the experience of actually reading the Britannica, which was an experience I'd actually had. (In hindsight, I don't think "people who have already done what I'm making light of attempting to do" was the target demographic.)
So whatever I blog about the experience of re-reading the encyclopedia, it won't be that. Also, it won't be an attempt to eventually write a memoir about the second time I read an entire encyclopedia or something. I'm done with the "monetize your blogging" part of my life.
(There will be an entire blog post on that topic later. It's currently an outline scribbled on the back of a book reserve slip.)
It's getting on in my evening, so if you'll excuse me, I have reading to do.