My Library

Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs used to be smart. «in high school and college, [he] was actually quite cerebral.» Covering pop culture at Entertainment Weekly, then highbrow pop culture at Esquire drained his brain. He wanted to feel smart again. So, he decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica all the way from a-ak to zywiec. Actually, he stole the idea from his father, an attorney and prolific author of law books, who tried the same feat but only made it to the mid-Bs. The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World is the story of his year long quest.

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Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey is the latest offering from Chuck Palahniuk, the author of cult classic Fight Club: A Novel - now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Ed Norton, Meat Loaf and Helena Bonham Carter - own it today on DVD! - and all the major fight club themes are back with a vengeance...and a twist. Male relations with God as a proxy for relations with fathers, people finding themselves through an underground movement of controlled violence but with a hint of something more sinister beneath the surface, a day world and night world existing side by side and a mostly younger, hip underclass ready to pee in your soup or maybe give you rabies.

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Tooth and Nail by Ian Rankin, originally released in 1992 under the title Wolfman, is the third in Rankin's Inspector Rebus series. Rebus is a Scottish police inspector called to London to help track down a serial killer called the Wolfman because of his habit of biting his victims. The story has the predictable coflict between the out of town expert and the locals, though it seems a bit unusual having the expert in coming in from the backwaters to the capital instead of the other way around.

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