One of the hardest things to do right now is pass the time. Once you figure that out, then it's equally hard to to be invested in something that you actually enjoy and benefit from. Thankfully, by mere coincidence I had a lot of books from the library before the big break. While I like literature a lot, I needed a change in genre. Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (the same man who created the online comic xkcd and wrote What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions) isn't a story, but rather closer to a textbook about how things work. Literally, it lists the inner workings of different inventions. It meticulously labels everything about something, from the parts of a car's engine to even the parts of a tree. On paper, this sounds boring, but there's a catch: the entire book is written in with the 1000 most common words in the English language. That means that every explanation of something is brutally simple. For example, a helicopter is called a "sky boat with turning wings." Mostly it makes many concepts easy to understand. The author said himself that his goal with this book was not to tell what things are, but rather focus on what they do and how they do what they do. Despite being informative, it's entertaining to read how Munroe works around even the easiest of words. While this is great, this is also, in some places, the weak part of the book. Not every word that is universally regarded as "simple" will make it to the 1000 most common words in the English language. Thus, some of the replacements are almost painful to read, and can be confusing instead of helpful. However, I think this is a very minor problem with the book that can be easily solved with using your own logic.
Opening the book up can be daunting. As it has to thoroughly explain every significant part of a machine, the long pages are filled with mountains of text. This is actually all part of the enjoyment in this book. The goal here is not to read through it as fast as possible, but to experience it. There is also a touch of humor to every page that keeps things exciting. There is a distinct visual beauty to the amount of detail from both the drawings and the text on each page. For
example, here's a picture on the page about how a cell phone works:
The above page can both be something out of a school textbook and a work of art. The diagrams are an incentive to keep learning.
Despite being immensely comprehensible, Thing Explainer is not a book that you can read through in a day. It took me about 2 months of slowly working through it to finally finish it the day before the date I am writing this blog. I think I enjoyed reading a page or two everyday over an extended period of time more than if I had read all of this in a few days.
Thing Explainer is an educational, enjoyable, and comical experience that definitely deserves a try for anyone who wants to learn something while just having fun.
My rating:
9.8/10
Great post! I have read What If before and enjoyed its humor and sarcasm. I have never heard of Thing Explainer before, but it definitely seems interesting. I like how you encouraged people to read this book even though it appears to have a huge amount of text on each page, and explained why it does. Because of the example you showed, and because the book was written by the same person who wrote What If, I might give this book a try.
ReplyDeleteAs a longtime fan of xkcd and Randall Munroe's books, I was excited to see this review. You did a good job of highlighting the humor that's thrown in and the way the book is engaging to read over a long period of time. I agree that all the text can look daunting at first but enhances the overall experience. Great review!
ReplyDeleteCool post! I have not read this book before, but you make it sound really interesting and fun to read. You did a really nice job summarizing the book and talking about how this book is fun to read over long periods of time.
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