I can still see it now: the blocky, squat, mass-market paperback copy of the Guinness Book of World Records on my ex-brother-in-law’s bedside table. The spine broken, the pages curled back at the corners and possibly spilled with beer, probably from being read in the bathtub or thumbed-through during an uneventful NFL game on a Sunday afternoon.

Ask any kid who grew up during the 70’s and 80’s, and they will probably recall the serendipitous convenience of the Guinness Book of World Records, whether found at a relative’s house, or in a sweltering laundromat on a Sunday afternoon with Mom after the Speed Queen finally broke down.

Guinness was especially valuable if you were NOT one of those ride-bikes-until-dinnertime kinds of kids (as I was not), but useful and interesting for anybody. You learned stuff. How many people still remember the photos of the Tallest Man, or the Woman With the Smallest Waist, or the Most Expensive Hotel Suite in the World (at the time I was reading, it was the Hoffheinz suite at the Astrodome Hotel in Houston).

This essay, however, is not an apologia for the Guinness Book of World Records.

Guinness was just the ultimate infra dig choice in an era that offered a whole array of entertaining handbooks and directories. The granddaddy of these, of course, was the set of encyclopedias that used to be a requisite, overpriced purchase for any aspirational middle class family. Unlike Guinness, though, the encyclopedias were not exactly fun. Guinness was fun, as was The Preppy Handbook, and its varied spawn. (Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, Real Women Don’t Pump Gas, The Jewish American Princess Handbook were three ones I actually owned.)

All of that stuff is on the Internet now. The parents of a thousand genres, these kinds of volumes directly descend to listicles on BuzzFeed—which themselves begat Instagram reels.

We’ve grown used to the defense of, and laments about, the decline of deep reading, and this is a grief in which I myself participate. This is not that, though.

What I want to defend here is not the content, per se, but the mode of reading itself: the power of random, serendipitous encounter, the slowly deepening knowledge encountered over hours and days and years of random flippings. Boredom begat curiosity, which begat a deepening humus of accumulated detail that prepared me later when I actually did read the Koran, or Revolutionary Road.

The difference here, I think, is what I might call “lateral reading,” rather than the Internet mechanism of funneling one ever more deeply narrowly into one subject. (Hence, the airless corridors of conspiracy theories.)

There’s a relevant analogue here from Alice MacDermott’s 1992 novel At Weddings and Wakes, in which the children of a family are stranded at their grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn, and as sad and elliptical conversations between their grandmother and aunts fly overhead, they once again turn the pages of the commemorative edition of Life magazine from the Kennedy Assassination. And although we are never supposed to conflate an author with the events of a work, the random observation of these children seems as though it was informed by experience.

And as lightweight as, say, Guinness was, it limned the strange contours of the world in a way I would not have otherwise known: The richest man in the world in the edition I read was the Sultan of Brunei, which was both a title and a country that I heretofore had not known existed. The Preppy Handbook, of all things, gave me a taxonomy of what was even then a declining subculture, but which even more advantageously instructed me in the social value of affecting nonchalance. (Which I later learned could also be termed sprezzatura!)

But there is one of these volumes that came to mean far more to me than any other: An Incomplete Education, by Judy Jones and William Wilson. Published in 1987, the book is a compendium of chapters about the kinds of things you were supposed to learn in college—if you had had a particularly broad and in-depth education. It was passed around the museum where I worked one summer and we all compared notes on it, so that I wanted to buy my own. It was not cheap: the doorstop-sized hardback cost $35—a huge sum when the minimum wage, which I was making, was $3.35 an hour.

It was money well spent. The chapters ranged from “American Studies” (one subhead is “American Intellectual History, and Stop That Snickering”) on down through “Literature” (“How to tell Keats from Shelley”) to “World History” (which has a sidebar on married rulers titled “Fun Couples”). The humor, as you can see, was Spy Magazine-era in its inspiration. (And if you don’t know Spy, you now have a whole other treasure trove to discover.)

The edition I have is, of course, dated now. The political science chapter has a section on what you’d need to know about someone from “West Germany,” and there are some obvious lacunae in representation. Revised editions of the book came out in 1995 and again in 2006. I might be interested in seeing what those newer versions have, but so far, I am sticking with West Germany.

Author William Wilson died at the woefully young age of 51 in 1999, and I did not know until I saw the NYT obituary about his history of AIDS activism, or that he and Judy Jones had met while working at Esquire. Since then, Jones has written many more books.

And the book has staying power: I no longer flip through Guinness, but I can spend an hour still rereading my favorite sections of An Incomplete Education, the sentences and sections of which have grooved themselves into my head now. Unlike the blind tunneling fostered online, to read this book is to venture into a maze, the way that Islamic iconography can represent the expansiveness of God.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” said Simone Weil, but it is nice to know that even fractured attention can build pathways from the particular to the infinite.

Caroline Langston has published nonfiction and fiction in a variety of journals and has been anthologized in the New Stories from the American South and Pushcart Prize volumes. She has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, and aired several commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered, in addition to writing essays and book reviews for The Christian Century, Image, Books and Culture, and other outlets, and was also a regular contributor to Image’s Good Letters blog. She is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Recently widowed, she lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children. She is currently finishing up a memoir about the U.S. cultural divide.

Close Reading is now available on Substack, where you can sign up to receive all posts directly to your inbox. To learn more, click here.