Book Notes: Non-Fiction

The Know-It All felt like a drag. I really enjoyed Jacobs' other book A Year of Living Biblically, but this one just didn't hold my interest the same way.

Jacobs takes on reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, as a way of completing a goal his intellectual father had but never finished. He comes across as an insecure, whiny, privileged upper middle class person who is embroiled in petty neuroses - often obsessing over people's approval and recognition of his intelligence.

Which is why he begins to foist his new-found facts on anyone and everyone, at any possible opening in the conversation.

The chapters are broken up into letters, and the facts he pulls out of the Britannica are organized alphabetically and he often intersects them with his past or present experience. So it becomes a memoir as well.

I took a break partway through to read other things for a while.

But I'm being a little harsh. It does get better, and the facts he pulls out are often quite interesting. By the end he seems to have also picked up a modicum of social awareness and some wisdom and perspective on history/life. So I was okay with it. But his other one (perhaps too because it's his second) was better. I'm on the waiting list for his newest book (where he tries all kinds of crazy health fads in a quest to become the healthiest person) so we'll see what I think of that!


Wheat Belly by William Davis was one of the books I got distracted by. His premise is that wheat has been mucked with so much in the past 50-ish years (to up the yield, etc.) that it is no longer the same plant our ancestors ate. And it is now harmful to our health - as addictive as heroin (binds to the same receptors), spikes your blood sugar levels higher than the same amount of table sugar (causing insulin spikes), and causes many, many other health problems. And apparently most of us don't digest it well, whether we know it or not. He claims that wheat makes us fat, tired, and causes inflammation and diabetes.

I've decided to give it a chance and have been wheat-free for almost a week. My stomach has been happy so far. I'd like to try being off it for a month or so and then reintroduce and see if I feel any negative effects. I haven't been hyper-vigilant about gluten popping up in other places - I haven't checked my toothpaste or looked for certified gluten-free oats (they're often processed in the same place as wheat). Maybe I'll eventually check out those products - we'll see.


Bringing up Bébé was another of my sidetrack reads. I found a good summary of it on another blog (why write my own when someone else has done it better?)

While the author's moral fibre may be questionable - she's written an article about how it's helpful to allow cheating and group sex in your marriage - the book had some excellent insights into the difference between N.American and Parisian parenting styles.

It's a little early for me to start reading parenting books (nope, nothing to announce). But I do want to be a parent eventually, and I was genuinely interested in the philosophical differences between French and American parenting. There are pieces of French parenting that made a lot of plain old common sense, specifically: establishing very strong boundaries but allowing freedom of choice within those, encouraging independent exploration/play, establishing strong rhythms of eating and sleeping, and teaching your child to wait, respect other adults, and respect your authority.