Obsessive Nerds for $1,000, Alex

By Lev Grossman

If Ken Jennings' brainiac (Villard; 269 pages) were a Daily Double on Jeopardy! you would want to bet cautiously. Not only does it have the ugliest cover of any book published so far this year (for what it's worth, the most beautiful is Bruce Wagner's Memorial), but also it is by Ken Jennings--you know, the Mormon computer-programmer celebrinerd who, beginning in 2004, rattled off a record-breaking 74-game Jeopardy! winning streak. Good enough for $2.5 million and 15 minutes of syndicated fame, but a book deal seems like a stretch.

Except the weird thing is, Jennings is actually a very charming, insightful writer. Instead of obsessing about the Streak, he explores the wider subculture of trivia. He goes to Stevens Point, Wis., for its annual town-wide 54-hr. trivia marathon. He hits trivia night in a Boston bar and kibitzes at a college quiz-bowl championship. He exhumes such trivia titans of yesteryear as John Timbs, the author of the 1856 best seller Things Not Generally Known, and Ruth Horowitz, the rebus-solving legend who dominated 20 straight episodes of Concentration in 1966. And of course Jennings gives us all the nerd-on-nerd action from his Jeopardy! stint, which he graciously chalks up to luck and good buzzer technique.

Jennings is hip enough to make fun of his freakish triviaphilia but savvy enough to indulge it too--part of the joy of Brainiac is learning that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day and that Charles Bronson was the only member of both The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen. There's something touching about the world of trivia. It's a place where minutiae have a paradoxical grandeur and no fact is meaningless. Or as the coach of Carleton's quiz-bowl team puts it, "Everything's going to be worth 10 points someday."