The subtitle of A. J. Jacobs’ book is One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. It is as tongue-in-cheek as it sounds, but at its core is a true accomplishment: the author read through the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in one year.

It’s a fun book, easy to pick up and easy to put down. Its biggest problem is one that it shares with the encyclopedia itself, which is that there is no plot, really, no unifying theme. Jacobs describes this problem, examines it, and gamely continues with his own book, which is also organized alphabetically, and consists in large part of scraps of trivia gleaned from his mental marathon. What this means is that his readers have a shadow of the same problem he did, which is that it’s hard to plow through a book that doesn’t have a narrative.

What does make it interesting are the events that transpire and the people he meets during his yearlong quest. He visits the Brittanica’s headquarters, and (funniest of all) tries to leverage the knowledge he picks up into power within his own little world, against, especially, his brother-in-law, who is a truly insufferable know-it-all.

Does he succeed in becoming the smartest person in the world, let alone the wisest? Do you even need to be told the answer to that question? Neither does he, really. But there is some wisdom that he finds near the end of the entire enterprise, a perspective that does come out of immersion in the sum total of the historic shames and glories of human history. I won’t give that away, because, irrationally, it seems like cheating. But I will reveal this: he admits that if you wanted to distill it all to a single sentence, you could do worse than: “This too shall pass.”