Know-It-All

I decided to read Know-It-All because Mizzay said she had read another book similar to this one by the same author, and thought it was a very enjoyable read. This book was very challenging for only a couple reasons. For one, there were some very interesting facts in this book I would die to remember, and secondly this book was very repetitive and long. For the first time, I would not recommend this book to my friends. Although it was very interesting, it just wasn’t very fun to read.

                This book was organized in chapters by the letters from the alphabet and because of this the book read as just fact after fact in each chapter. The hardest part of reading this book was trying to remember some of these fun facts. For one, abalone, a type of snail, has five separate holes for excreting waste. Another fun fact is that for a Pueblo Indian woman to get a divorce, all she would have to do is place her husbands moccasins on the doorstep and SHABAM! They are divorced! There were many things I would try to do to remember some of the facts like re-reading things over and over multiple times, and dog tagging the page of a fun fact so I could go back and refer to it whenever I wanted.

                This book was very repetitive. Every chapter was a letter from the alphabet and then in each chapter there would be word after word starting with that letter. Although this was a big part of the repetitiveness another contributor was the pattern in which the author wrote. The Jacobs would write his chapters so it was word, fact, word, fact, and then a personal story relating the word back to his life. Although some of the stories were quite funny and some of the facts were defiantly worth remembering, it still became just too much the same all the time. This repetitiveness caused the book to get old very fast and I found myself beginning to get bored in the H chapter.

                Although the first challenge of this book was a fun one to overcome the second was in charge of making or breaking the book. Unfortunately it broke it and I would not consider recommending this book to anyone unless they simply needed to look up the definition of a word. Over all I am partially happy to have read this book because now I know fun facts that no one else does. Also I’m happy I have experienced a new kind of book because I know now that I don’t need to read another like it.

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