Mitchell Symons

Fun little book about all things wordy and alphabetical that's a mixture of the pedestrian (palindromes and acronyms), the bizarre (United Arab Emirates is the longest country name with alternating vowels and consonants), and the hilarious (the phrase Hobson's choice resulted from a stingy horse dealer who forced buyers to take only the horse next to the wall and gave them no say in the matter - hence Hobson's choice). Its a great book to read cover to cover (will only take an hour, tops) or show more dip into for your own amusement and/or education (did you know Hull City is the only British football club whose letters cannot be filled in with pencil?) If you like words, if you like unusual and weird facts, or if you just like learning utterly useless things, you will love this little book. show less

SLICK, amusing, professional and just a tad salacious, this book falls into the category of what used to be called “lavatorial literature”. While the questions might not be ones you’ve even thought of, let alone want answered, they are full of prurient fascination. Covering everything from “Are letters sent to ‘men’s’ magazines genuine?” to “Why are the men in porn movies so ugly?” — with a host of raunchy topics in between — this is a gold mine of funny sexual trivia.

See, these are the sort of books that I simply adore. Neither one of them were actually "little" except that they were somewhat shorter than regular hard back books. Both had 360+ pages, though, and were chock full of lists of interesting trivia. They reminded me a lot of the Book of Lists series from back in the 1970s, and covered a lot of the same sorts of things. People who dropped out of school, last words of famous people, men who were 7th sons of 7th sons (Glen Campbell and Perry Como, show more BTW), what famous people did during WWII, people who have/had a famous mother-in-law, this is the stuff I want to know about. LOL I thought these books were delightful. I had one or the other of them in the bathroom most of the month and when I finished them earlier this week, I went to put them on the shelf and the rest of my family asked me to leave them in there! LOL These both get a 5 for sure. show less

I enjoy trivia. I find a lot of the pop culture stuff in here fairly boring, especially the ones that are formatted like "People who [have a pilot's license/were adopted/were married 8 times]" and then just a long list of names. I actually read the second book first (oops. I've had these books lying around forever and have read them before, so it's not a big deal. Also it's not as though there's any sort of continuity to worry about), and it improves on this aspect.