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My husband and my daughter and my father and my best friend and I are all reading The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class , not because, as the title suggests, we are preparing for a stroll amidst the “cultured classes” ( I have a hard enough time finding matching socks to wear to the grocery store! What do you wear whilst roaming amongst the cultured? Tennis shoes? I think not.) but because it’s fun, it’s provocative, and it’s filled with the tantalizing little orts of information that you read aloud to your husband, daughter, father or best friend until they all are so intrigued by your pearl-dropping that they all buy their own copies to read, which is so very cool because then you all get to talk about what you read and it inevitably leads to an exchange of all sorts of other tangential information and speculation and that’s what a good conversation is about.

The off-putting title not withstanding (there is something unpleasant about the suggestion that one of the only reasons you’d be interested in this stuff is to impress others) like any religious devotional, The Intellectual Devotional is 365 pages long, the length of a year, divided into weeks and then into the days of the week. Each day features a brief, one page article about a given subject, footnoted with additional facts. Monday’s topic is given to history, Tuesday’s literature, Wednesday’s the visual arts, Thursday’s science, Friday’s music, Saturday’s philosophy and Sunday’s religion. The topics do not follow a chronological order. For instance, Day Two, Literature, is about James Joyce’s Ulysses (did you know that the last chapter is a stream of consciousness single paragraph that goes on for 24,000 words and is divided into just eight sentences?) while one of the last Literature entries is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18.

This book is for all you mental magpies out there. After reading it, you won’t be able to explain the political ramifications of the Manhattan Project, but you will be able to toss out the choice tidbit that the first successful nuclear chain reaction took place in a squash court under the bleachers of the University of Chicago’s football stadium in 1942 or that Tennessee Williams real name was Thomas and he earned the nickname because of his family’s long history in that state. (Hm. I bet they were amongst that cultured class referred to in the title, too.)

The reception for this book has been so positive that the authors have promised to write another one with the aid of their of their star cast of contributing authorities. I’m already planning on getting it. And then I’m buying me some new shoes.