The Second Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is (Still) Wrong, by John Lloyd

Oh, trivia how I love thee! I think I'll see if I can find the first book. I didn't get all the sidebar humor--it's very British. I think I learned stuff, but for the life of me right now I can't think of anything. Ah, the best part of trivia is that it moves into my brain and takes up lodging without any stress on me at all.

Listomania : A World of Fascinating Facts in Graphic Detail, by The Listomaniacs

Fun, easy to read graphics. Probably took me less than 90 minutes of concentrated attentiveness. I read it while I was working a Scholastic book fair, and while waiting for my laptop to boot up.

FYI (edited by Bjorn Carey)

This was science presented in bite-sized chunks. Fun. I did like the approach, and the questions were fun. Not precisely deep, hard science, but still interesting. LOTS of space stuff.

We Are Amused, by Brian Hoey

Hmm, well, I had this on the sidebar as 'humor' but it is NOT humor; it is dead-serious trivia about the  British Royal Family. Rather oddly arranged--alphabetically, in general, except for the Important Info about Each Person and their awards, titles, etc.--and QUITE confusing for this American trying to follow when someone's title changes over time. Ugh. Who are these people who keep track of all this stuff!?!

Rules of Thumb : A Life Manual, by Tom Parker

Oh, fun, a sound-bite book of lists! Some interesting factoids here, some funny stuff, and some stuff I can actually use. This was a Christmas gift.

1,000 Common Delusions : And the Real Facts Behind Them by Christa Pöppelmann

I've been working on this for about three weeks. It's not that complicated, certainly not difficult reading, but it's the sort of thing that you can't really read in long stints. There was a lot of interesting stuff in the book in short paragraphs.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I found at least a couple of either completely wrong or vaguely not-quite-right pieces of information (e.g., Jesus grew up in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, according to the gospels; this was basically a typo, but one that should have been caught). Once you've had that experience, it tends to color the way you look at the rest of the details. So I can't honestly recommend the book in terms of research, but for a trivia nut, it would be interesting.

I really love this kind of thing. It's obvious that I pretty much had no choice in the little matter of becoming a librarian!