Book – The Top 10 of EverythingAuthor – Russel Ash
Year – 2007
Genre – Fact Book
Bought for me by my Mum and Dad
Whilst ‘Everything’ may be a little bit of an exaggeration, the title of this book does still go a long way to decribing its contents. This is a massive hardbacked book jammed full of that favourite of men everywhere – lists. Men love lists. Give a man a copy of Wisden’s or of FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women, and aside from looking at the pictures (in the latter book obviously) they will happily compile a list of positions from the year before and the percentage of blondes to redheads. Men love lists, and thus, as a man, this is the perfect kind of book for me.
The problem with this particular book is that there are three different types of lists in here. There are the lists that I found genuinely interesting – Top 10 Goal Scorers in the European Championships or Top 10 Animated Films in the UK. There are the lists that I was not interested in, but I could understand other people being interested in – Top 10 Highest Earning Female Golfers or Top 10 Longest Bridges. Then there are the ones that I just don’t see who could be particularly interested in – Top 10 Mobile Phone Owning Countries or Top 10 Years With the Most Murders on the UK. Whilst these last two sound interesting, they pretty much fall into a list of countries you would expect – think USA and Japan – and a list of the last ten years in a random looking order. This information could of course be useful to some people, but I can’t imagine any of them picking up a book like this which is purely a fun trivia book. And therein is the biggest problem of all – the book is probably about half full of the last category.
It’s not the worst book of it’s kind around, but it really drags when you get to a section that doesn’t interest you at all. As I think I mentioned in a previous blog, I will be reading more of this kind of book this year, but fingers crossed that some of them impove a little over the ones I have read so far.
5/10