Stuff You Should Know

Josh Clark , Chuck Bryant, 2020

Summary

27 Chapters of interesting things you might not know about, like various histories (facial hair, guns, Kevorkian) or other factlets about Americana, child prodigies, and cargo cults. Adapted from a popular podcast called Stuff You Should Know.

Thoughts

Full disclosure, I’ve never listened to Stuff You Should Know. It theoretically is up my alley, but the market for trivial bits of interesting information wrapped up in narrative and banter is saturated. I picked this book up because my partner had purchased it. She is a fan of the show. I have no qualms with it. Just saturated with trivial pursuits already, like I said. Despite the claim that this is knowledge you should possess, this isn’t a field guide to distinguishing poisonous berries from their similarly berry-hued and berry-shaped and nutritious brethren. There are no guides to the best knot for each securing fishing hook to fishing line, or how to gut a fish, or anything about fish at all, really. On how one might handle a tricky interpersonal problem at work, this book is silent. I can’t imagine ever needing to employ knowledge of the history of Mr Potato Head unless stuck in an elevator with a particularly deranged fan of Hasbro toys. Toys and jokes are alike in that explanation of their genesis saps any fun they might be.

Despite the exhortation that we should, in fact, know these things, the book is a good “compendium of mostly interesting things”. I enjoyed the history of Kevorkian, or the history of guns. The tone is tongue in cheek, the authors of course don’t take themselves seriously, and both seem to have a good rapport that occasionally translates onto the page via snippy footnotes. The artwork enhances the flow, and the typesetting is consistent and visually alluring.

That said, for me there is a ceiling of enjoyment for these type of factlet books; I find myself reading in snippets and putting down for days or weeks before compelling myself for the sake of completeness to come back. The subject matter is interesting enough, and I do enjoy random and mostly trivial pieces of information, gathering them up like one of those birds who scavenges string or pieces of newspaper or candy wrappers to build a nest. But I think I am a sucker for throughline narrative. I’ve written this review a little while after reading this book, and while that distance might not blur my memory of a book, I found it disturbingly hard to remember the sections of this book, let alone their interesting contents. While this might be stuff you should know, I’ve found it was more like mental cotton candy – airy and disappears quick.