Elledge’s Nontrivial Trivia

For those who love learning a little bit about a lot of things, both important and trivial, this is a book you might want to spend some time with. It opens with several creation stories and goes on to discuss the Cosmos and much of what is in it. The Cosmos is covered in fewer than 40 pages, so that should give you an idea of how little depth there is for any of the articles. But that’s okay. It doesn’t pretend to be an encyclopedia. The writing by John Elledge is breezy and light with a lot of humor, but there is still a fair amount of good information. The book is extensively footnoted, and those are not to be missed, as some of the best humor is found there. Elledge is British, so some of his metaphors may be a bit of a stretch for Americans. For instance, he describes the size of Kitts and Nevis to the London Borough of Croydon. That will be meaningless to most American readers. Still, this is a fun book to keep on hand. One probably won’t read it through, but instead read in bits during spare time.