The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment (edition 2009)

This is a great book for a gift or to read on the plane. It's funny, somewhat informative and finishes with an essay at the end by the author's long-suffering but not necessarily quiet or patient wife. It's better than The Know-It-All (which was pretty good) in which AJ attempts to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But its not as good as A Year of Living Biblically - dressed in a long robe with sandals and a wild beard he makes some serious points while making a total fool of himself and writing about it.

I look forward to his next book, guaranteed humour with a definite analytical edge. ( )

The third of A.J. Jacobs life-experiment books, unlike the others which focused on one idea only, this book encompasses a variety of different experiments A.J. makes with his life.

Firstly I enjoyed this one a lot more than [b:The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible|495395|The Year of Living Biblically One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible|A.J. Jacobs|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266569301s/495395.jpg|2325789]. There was a lot more humour in this one and it flowed much better. His last book just felt overly long whereas here each experiment is only fairly short. I also like the codas at the end as I'd previously read his outsourcing article before and it was good to get an update on it.

He has some really interesting points and things I want to look at in my own life. Whilst I don't want to be Radically Honest I believe a bit more honesty wouldn't be a bad thing and that maybe unitasking occasionally would give my brain a break.

A short but entertaining read I would recommend this one is worth reading. ( )

Contrary to the opinion of some of my otherwise right-thinking online book review friends, I thought this was better than Jacobs's previous two books. Perhaps this is because those challenges' massive scope and long duration (reading the encyclopedia and living by biblical precepts) were enormous, which introduced too many opportunities for inconsistency, intellectual shallowness, and general pronouncements that seemed to me to miss the point of the experiment. Here, the scale suits the experiments, which are reasonably contained and do not have such grand philosophical rationalizations. In this, the book seems much more honest. I particularly like the exploration of outsourcing one's life. It was interesting, humorous, and Jacobs's analysis of its implications seemed reasonable and appropriately scaled. The chapter on cognitive errors and distortions was highly-notated but, as my students would attest, clearly the work of someone outside the field of cognitive therapy.

I mildly submit an addendum to the anecdote in which Jacobs's aunt sends him an e-mail about "God's Pharmacy," in which "the shapes of food contain clues from God about nutrition" (p. 89). Jacobs's informs his aunt that this is an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Good start. However, this only scratches the surface. The technical name for the underlying philosophy of the e-mail is the Doctrine of Signatures. Also according to his source, Wikipedia, "herbs that resemble various parts of the body can be used to treat ailments of that part of the body." This was also extended to foods (e.g., eat walnuts for your brain; don't eat potatoes because they look like leprous fingers), which I know from recently reading a book about the history of the potato. I realize Jacobs is a magazine writer and that the point here isn't depth or interesting tangents, but it does surprise me a little that he doesn't seem to be familiar with the concept, since it figured heavily (and still does today) in the medical practices of much of the world and therefore surely appears multiple times in the encyclopedia, and the logic it relies on is repeated over and over in Jewish law, which uses a different form of analogy than does English Common Law.

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I've enjoyed all of this author's books. His experiments on himself are unique, but always enlightening, and I find his ability to portray all his failings and foibles with a positive spin make the stories he tells work. ( )

Rented this book after a friend on Goodreads boosted about it, it was a good read and funny in parts. I enjoyed the read it was a quick read. ( )