Encyclopedia (百科全书, 百科事典, 백과 사전)

Playing chess. Going camping. Going surfing. Taking a road trip. Going to a baseball game. Going to a music concert. Watching TV. Sleeping all weekend. Reading a book. Going to a wedding. I hear a lot of fun things that other do in this wild wacky world of ours, but of all the activities I've heard friends say they are actively doing, I've never heard anyone say they are busy reading the encyclopedia. I suspect this is partly because of the nerdiness associated with reading dictionaries and books that never really went away after grade school where you just don't want to be outed as the nerd who is in the library reading references books for fear of getting your lunch money stolen or just bullied by other kids in your class, but it also could be that encyclopedias seem boring. They don't have a plot like novels do, they don't have a famous actor or actress on the cover marketing their tell-all memoir, they don't prepare you for any particular test like the LSAT or the GRE or the MCATs. There's really no purpose especially in our internet age of reading physical encyclopedias like the Britannica or the World Book Encyclopeda (my go-to encyclopedia). And yet, I must be a special breed because whenver I go to a new library, I always wonder where their encyclopedias are, and often crack open the A section to check out where all the familiar sections of "Alaska," "atoms," and "aardvarks" are and what they say about them (a lot of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Samuel Adams action in the first few pages of the A's in the encyclopedia, by the way). I often find that these encyclopedias are in near-mint condition because nobdy has read them; it's like cracking open a new book and the pages still kind of stick together, and pages turn crisply with a little "whoosh" sound. I get enjoyment out of taking an adventure into those pages, but also of the content of the encyclopedias: they've really made an effort (probably to attract any readers they can) to put in more pictures, make the entries more reader-friendly, full of stats, quotations, fun facts, etc., so that it's not pages upon pages of full text. Still....reading an encyclpedia front-to-back is pretty hard work, I like the overviews of states with their capitals, populations, landmarks, famous peoples, famous universities, largest cities, etc., but in between are entries that you can only take so much of like random species of trees, plants, bygone technology, books you've never heard of, old medieval instruments, yet another type of antelope native to Africa. One really is incentivized to skip ahead to something that you're interested in. I've just never ever in my life been interested in fashion and clothing, and it's just a bore sometimes reading about all kinds of shoes, fabrics, styles of the 1930s, etc. It doesn't help that each tome is 800 pages or so, depending on it's a meaty letter like "A" or "M" or even if they have to divide certain letters like C (C-Ch is just one tome). It really doesn't help that encyclopedias are characterized as "reference books," so they're for libary use only and can't be checked out. In this day and age, who's going to steal an encyclopedia? I wonder each time I go to the library and have to put the book back for the next time. Luckily, there are encyclopedias on various topics that CAN be checked out like Space encyclopedia, dog encyclopedia (I really like that one, shows a lot of pictures of dogs and gives the illusion that I have one of those dogs, without actually having one). Yup, reading the encyclopedia is difficult, which is why I give props to an author named AJ Jacobs (I've discussed him before) who took on the monumental project of reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover in about 2003-2004. This was before iPhones and just the beginning of the Internet, so people had more uses for encyclopedias back then as a source of knowledge, but still his story inspires me that others have done it before. He didn't even read the read-friendly World Book version, he did the Britannica all-text black and white copy version. Yikes. I honestly don't know if any normal person would do that in today's day and age without some serious monetary incentive now. There's just too much out there. I'm able to go to the library and sit down for a solid hour without checking my phone (and actualy my eyes thank me for letting them read a physical piece of paper instead of a screen, either phone or computer) but it's just too tempting nowadays with a device smarter than any encyclopedia just sitting in your pocket and beeping all the time with new alerts, new information, new communication from friends, there's just too much to do nowadays to read encyclopedias. I wonder how college kids read textbooks, to be honest. But Jacobs's book about reading the encyclopedia is great: he describes trying to use the facts he learned in normal conversation, to no avail; he just sounds kind of weird at parties, he lugs the book around the New York City subway and other inconvenient places to have a 5-pound brick of a book with you at all times, and he discusses important entries he learns about Descartes (liked cross-eyed women), gagaku (Japanese music), all very relatable to an encyclopedia reader: so much human knowledge that is right at our fingertips everyday that we just brush by without a second's thought. Before reading the encyclopedia and getting into trivia (more like general knowledge), I was naive like a babe in the woods. Now after having read the encyclopedia, there's still a world of information I don't know, but I at least know a little about the stuff that I don't know and how much else there is to know. The more you learn, the more you understand how much more there is to learn. In 10 years when all human beings will be programmed with a microchip with all the knowledge in the universe or there's a magic pill that increases your IQ by 100 points, and encyclopedias including digital encyclopedias become obsolete, I'll always look back on those days spent leafing through an encyclopedia and getting endorphin hits each time I learned something new, as "those were the good ol' days."