Good for Traveling, Not for Entertainment

I can remember back to middle school when we’d get the Scholastic book order catalogs, I’d skip over the Goosebumps, Encyclopedia Brown, and other stock middle school series, to get right to the section on geography.  Be it a book on flags of the world, a specific region of the world, it didn’t matter; I wanted it!  When the book would arrive I’d race home and begin absorbing all of the information it had to offer.

This turned into travel lust as a teenager and collegiate.  By that time I had embraced my knowledge of random facts of the world and the ability to state the country based on any given flag (my friends loved to try and prove me wrong!).  Now, as a teacher myself, I love to drop some of these nerd-facts on my students and watch them process their how-does-he-know-that look or the is-this-going-to-be-on-a-quiz stare.  It’s all part of the game.

So to Gary Fuller’s book, The Trivia Lover’s Guide to Even MOre of the World.  The title itself seemed to be written just for me and I snatched it off the library shelf as if someone was going to fight me fore it.  I’ve devoured the book in two days, not a huge feat but a success in my book.  However, it was a let down.  There’s a lot of interesting facts and maps, but they were loosely related so it seemed quite random. Each chapter has a theme and some questions related to the theme that Mr. Fuller addresses, but the theme is broad and the questions are only superficially related.  The best part was the author’s infrequent snarky remarks that added some much needed humor. I’d recommend this as a book to read while traveling.