Review
THE UNCYCLOPEDIA
by Gideon Haigh
Hyperion, 159 pp.
I have longed for a book like The Uncyclopedia. It’s a miraculous paradox: a compilation of significant trivia. Until I read it, I had no idea what I wanted to know.
Sadly, it’s impossible to recommend a book of facts without being tedious. Did you ever want to read the poems of Muhammad Ali? Learn the occupations of all the vice-presidents of the U.S.? Memorize collective nouns for animals? Learn how to keep a slave or test the freshness of an egg? Of course you didn’t. You’ll have to take my word for it when I say Gideon Haigh’s little compilation of facts, definitions and instructions is anything but tedious.
The beauty of this book is that it isn’t just a package of novel information – The Uncyclopedia is a reminder of things you may have forgotten, or wondered about and neglected to look up. Haigh’s tone, while occasionally playful, is never overtly humorous, facetious or smug. This book gives no impression of having been written to amuse or impress, but instead to gently impart knowledge that may be of interest to a reader. Haigh – an Australian who is, incidentally, one of the world’s leading cricket writers – has an uncanny ability to identify knowledge that will interest his readers (or at least this reader), whether it’s a complete list of appellations for Margaret Thatcher or the entire text of the Emancipation Proclamation.
What separates this volume from the average tome of useless knowledge is the simple fact that its information may actually be retained for longer than the microsecond required to read it. It lacks the ostentatious space-filler of the Guinness Book of World Records and neatly avoids the bloated, trashy feel of the Bathroom Reader. The Uncyclopedia is, quite simply, the best collection of random facts I’ve ever read.
So, what place is there for a book like this in a society like ours, where the Internet makes information so readily accessible? It’s simple: this book is for the bathtub, the bus and the nightstand. And lest I should give the wrong impression that the only advantage of The Uncyclopedia over the World Wide Web is that it’s more portable, let me say this: the brilliance of this book is that it is finite. I’m no Luddite, but the Internet is only useful to people who know exactly what they’re looking for, or else don’t mind being indefinitely sidetracked; this book isn’t long enough to grow tiresome or intricate enough to be frustrating. Despite being similar to the web in essence – i.e.: a repository of mostly irrelevant information – it actually serves as an antidote to a day of Internet research. Haigh’s book is so very quiet, so assured and charming. The Internet is many things, but charming is not one of them.
So browse The Uncyclopedia, hold it in your hands, fold pages and make notes in the margin. For God’s sake, just buy it. Buy it so Haigh will write another. You want it more than you know.
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