"Can't You Just Read The Wikipedia Article?"

I cannot believe how many times I have heard those words. It has been a fortnight since I started this project, and it has to have been said by at least as many people as there have been days. To sum up, yes. I could read the Cliffs Notes, SparkNotes, Wikipedia page, get a lecture, read the graphic novel, watch the movie, or do something else. But to do that would miss half the point of everything.

The reason I started on this is because I wanted to improve my abilities for my high school trivia team. We are sorely lacking anybody on the team with, how would you say, culture. I, being the one who does theatre, seems to be the only one in the general vicinity. So, I decided to start on a quest. Read the top 100 most-used books for trivia questions, top to bottom, through and through.

This appeals to me in a number of ways. First, I'm an avid fan of books by A.J. Jacobs, who has been making a career out of stunts like following the Bible to the letter, reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica A-Z and outsourcing his life to India. Second, I have always wanted to read more literature. I have a solid range of pop culture knowledge, stemming from my parents. I know Dirty Dancing from Breakfast Club, and I can connect a quote to a movie better than many. But real books, real literature, had started to fade away.

So this seemed like the perfect solution. I have a reason to do it: help the team, get better at trivia. It also builds me as a person: learn something, become more cultured. And it's because of that that just reading the Wikipedia article simply will not do. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it to its fullest extent. No abrdiged versions, no pop-up books. I'm not going to read Crime and Punishment in the original Russian, but as much as possible I am going to try and get the books straight from the source.

Here is where I am going to log my thoughts on each book. My preliminary list is 80 books long, and it should continue growing all the time. I would hate to forget a single thing I've dredged out of this, so I'm going to pour it all out here. Wish me luck.