Andrew Pettie (text) and Andrés Lozano (illustrator), Listified! Britannica’s 300 lists that will blow your mind, Britannica Books, September 2021, 414 pp., RRP $21.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781912920747
This is a remarkable book to produce in the age of the internet. At a time when almost all knowledge is available to us at the press of a button on a computer, and at a time when knowledge is changing rapidly and is being almost instantly updated online, why produce a book of facts about the world that will be unwieldy, and will quickly go out of date? Perhaps one answer here is that the book is fun. That it is informative is almost secondary to the fun facts and their inspired arrangement as lists.
The lists come arranged under eight headings such as ‘space’, ‘nature’, dinosaur times’, ‘the body’ or ‘inventions’. Under ‘space’ readers will find a list of fun facts about the expanding universe, matter, black holes or our sun. They will find that the sun will last for another 6.5 billion years before it uses up all its fuel, and that its total mass is 99.8% of all the matter that is in our solar system. Each of these facts will take some time to sink in and enter imaginations, so the book isn’t suitable for a speedy read. It would be best to have it lying around in a handy spot for a year or two as we work our way through it.
We know about ‘bookmarks’ from using search engines on our computers, but I suggest that while dipping in to this compendium you keep a few actual bookmarks handy so that places can be marked where there are facts that might be consulted time and time again. I have already bookmarked page 78 where all the various types of clouds are listed. Handy. We are familiar too with hyperlinks in texts on computer screens. Can a book reproduce this sort of cleverness? Well, yes, it can via the footnotes that let readers know where to go in this book for related facts.
You can find yourself flipping and zipping back and forth all over the book if you’re not keeping your curiosity under control. One last set of fun facts: Australia is fifteenth in the world for chocolate consumption. Each of us eats almost 100 50 gram bars of chocolate a year (do you?). In China, people eat about two bars a year. I am not sure what this means, but I do know now that ‘chocolate’ is an Aztec word.
Hours of fun are available in this book for readers from eight to twenty-nine (the age of my son, who will soon take this book from me for his bedside/kitchen/lounge room reading).
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
