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QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition (Qi: Book of General Ignorance 1) by [John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, Stephen Fry]

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John Mitchinson

John Lloyd

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition (Qi: Book of General Ignorance 1) Kindle Edition

by John Lloyd (Author), John Mitchinson (Author), Stephen Fry (Foreword) Format: Kindle Edition

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An indispensable compendium of popular misconceptions, misunderstandings and common mistakes culled from the hit BBC show, QI.

From the bestselling authors of The Book of General Ignorance comes a noticeably stouter edition, with 26% extra facts and figures perfect for trivia, pub quiz and general knowledge enthusiasts. The QI team sets out again to show you that a lot of what you think you know is wrong.

If, like Alan Davies, you still think the Henry VIII had six wives, the earth has only one moon, that George Washington was the first president of the USA, that Bangkok is the capital of Thailand, that the largest living thing is a blue whale, that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, that whisky and bagpipes come from Scotland or that Mount Everest is the world's tallest mountain, then there are at least 200 reasons why this is the book for you.

The researchers at QI have written many bestselling books including such titles as The QI Book of General Ignorance and 1,277 Facts To Blow Your Socks Off. They now present a noticeably stouter edition, an indispensable handbook for trivia lovers, pub quiz enthusiasts and general knowledge experts alike.

And remember - everything you think you know is still wrong.

Print length

510 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Faber & Faber
Publication date

7 October 2010
File size

2904 KB
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Product description

About the Author

John Lloyd CBE devised The News Quiz and To the Manor Born for radio and Not The Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image and Blackadder for television. John Mitchinson has been both bookseller and publisher and looked after authors as diverse as Haruki Murakami, The Beatles and a woman who knitted with dog hair. Together they are in charge of research for the hit BBC show QI, and have written many bestselling books, including such titles as The Book of General Ignorance, 1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off and most recently, 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You sideways. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004AP9LP6
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Faber & Faber; Main edition (7 October 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2904 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 510 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 170,337 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 42 in Quizzes (Kindle Store)
- 51 in Trivia Puzzles & Games
- 83 in TV Tie-In Humour

Customer Reviews:
727 ratings

About the authors

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John Mitchinson
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John is a writer and publisher. He was Waterstone’s first marketing director before becoming a publisher at the Harvill Press and then Cassell & Co. His authors included the Beatles, Michael Palin, Richard Ford, Haruki Murakami and a woman who knitted with doghair. In 2001 he joined TV producer John Lloyd to set up QI Ltd (www.qi.com). They have recently produced the tenth series of the BBC TV show, and their series of bestselling QI books have been translated into 29 languages. John is also a Vice-President of the Hay Festival and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He writes a weekly QI column in the Saturday Telegraph. His latest venture is co-founding Unbound (www.unbound.co.uk), the UK’s first crowd-funded publishing house which won the 2011 Futurebook Innovation Award for Best Startup in 2011.
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John Lloyd
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John Lloyd is the founder of QI and the producer of some of Britain’s best-loved TV shows. He is of the same opinion as Plato: unmitigated seriousness has no place in human affairs. On the other hand, he also likes A. N. Whitehead’s assertion that it’s more important for something to be interesting than true (although it’s more likely to be interesting if it is true).
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Customer reviews

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heather cameron

QI

Reviewed in Australia on 13 April 2014

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Love it....it's a book even the kids are enjoying! It's as good as the tv program and very funny comments at the end of each section. Very good read.

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Jane S

Just like the TV show

Reviewed in Australia on 8 December 2014

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Loved this - if you like the show, you'll love the trivia in this book. It's clever and witty and jokes from the show are included. A great book!

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Amazon Customer

Interesting - at a Basic Level

Reviewed in Australia on 12 April 2014

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A book of throw-away lines and explanations that would assist any 'pub philosopher' in impressing the less knowledgeable. Unfortunately, a number of the explanations are wrong.

Reviewed in Australia on 12 April 2014

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I found this book entertaining. I like trivia and knew quite facts. I haven't finishes yet as it is a good fill in when I don't want
something too involved or too long. I am not a fan of short stories, so this fills in when I am looking for something light.

Reviewed in Australia on 12 April 2014

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This is a book you can put down and pick up. I am still enjoying it. Many interesting topics. I love it

Reviewed in Australia on 12 April 2014

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As with the TV series, this book is a source of much enlightenment and correction of commonly held false beliefs. Highly recommended to anyone who appreciates witty and intelligent commentary on a broad range of topics and minutia.

Reviewed in Australia on 9 December 2020

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Very interesting

Reviewed in Australia on 14 May 2016

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get it in your head, you need it

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Chaundy

Must have for all families

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 May 2020

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If you're looking at this book you're probably a fan of the TV series, so I don't need to explain what the book is about. My child who is 10 loves reading as do I. A book of random facts where the wording in the question is key to understanding the answer. Example, the tallest mountain compared to the highest mountain give you two different answers.

Would I recommend this book? Yes!

2 people found this helpful

Clive

CONCENTRATED QI

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 February 2014

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As I didn't have the earlier, slimmer, version of this book I have no complaints about a re-hash or being cheated. Anyone buying this book will get exactly what they expect and almost all will be delighted by that. I was! There was very, very, little in this book that I already knew and the real frustration is that, after every new fact, I thought "Wow, I'll remember that!" when, in reality, I can remember almost nothing.

I didn't dip in and out of this book; I read it like a novel and like the true 'QI junkie' that I am. Each snippet is short; usually less than two pages and there are lots and lots of them. They are ordered in a very loose arrangement that makes some, often very tenuous, connection between one item and the next. All are utterly fascinating and I didn't come across a single item that was only 'mildly interesting'; every one was brilliant.

Everyone who buys this book (for themselves) must be satisfied with it as you wouldn't buy it unless you are a fan of the QI TV programme, and, if you are, this is like a concentrated dose of pure QI. This is the beef stock cube of pedantic trivia and I loved it!

As you might imagine, I'm a real 'know-all' and delight in trotting out those little known facts at the drop of a hat. It doesn't make me popular but it does entertain me! I will, definitely, be dipping into this little gem from time to time and the index at the back is very helpful. Actually, a tiny proportion of this wisdom will stay with me. For example, the next time that I see the banana plants around our villa in Cyprus, I'll remember that they aren't trees at all and are sterile! Osmotic learning at its best.

You wouldn't be reading this unless you were contemplating buying this book. And you wouldn't be contemplating buying it unless you had seen QI on TV and it had piqued your interest. Here's some news for you; If you've got this far, it's too late and you're hooked, so just give in to the cravings, buy this book and wriggle with guilty pleasure as you soak up everything you'll never need to know.

9 people found this helpful

tiggrie AKA Sarah

Enormous fun

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 July 2012

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I'm sure there must be folks out there who hate random snippets of knowledge and don't care who actually invented the telephone, why geese were once thought to be a kind of fish or even a vegetable, whether one can die by eating too many potatoes, what Richard Gere's middle name is, or which nation consumes the most Spam. But in all honesty, I don't know why any of them would buy this book.

If, like me, you enjoy finding out that Eskimos buy refrigerators to stop their food from getting too cold, or why a paperclip was an emotive symbol in Norway during WWII, or having your curiosity piqued to realise that scientists don't know how ants manage to have a photographic memory or that the best place to find a hitherto unknown to science species is in your own back garden, then this will be right up your street.

I'm sure there must be folks out there who hate random snippets of knowledge and don't care who actually invented the telephone, why geese were once thought to be a kind of fish or even a vegetable, whether one can die by eating too many potatoes, what Richard Gere's middle name is, or which nation consumes the most Spam. But in all honesty, I don't know why any of them would buy this book.

If, like me, you enjoy finding out that Eskimos buy refrigerators to stop their food from getting to cold, or why a paperclip was an emotive symbol in Norway during WWII, or having your curiosity piqued to realise that scientists don't know how ants manage to have a photographic memory or that the best place to find a hitherto unknown to science species is in your own back garden, then this will be right up your street.

As an extra added bonus for fans of the show, there are snippets of dialogue from various episodes, which are generally funny and sometimes howlingly so.

So if you would like to find out what rhymes with orange, why banana plants walk, or which sea mammals served as part of the Task Force in Iraq, snap this up and enjoy.

4 people found this helpful

Radiojock

Love how it's written and presented

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 March 2013

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I've just finished the book 1,227 Facts to Blow Your Socks Off by these two Authors, which really surprised me with the facts presented. In this tome, some of those facts from that book are represented here with a fuller discussion as to why what is said is 'fact'. It's incredibly interesting and a very easy read.

I love simple compendium-type books and this fits that bill perfectly. You'll love the one on how to suppress a crocodile!

In the aforementioned Facts book, I noticed a very strange thing whilst reading it on my Kindle Fire. It counted the time left in chapter down in the bottom left hand corner of each page. This book also started with that format, but has since changed to Page Numbers. I notice that this feature begins as checking your reading speed. I'll have to watch that again when I read Book 2 in this series to see if it happens again. Quite honestly, I'd rather have the page numbers! Perhaps someone saw my review for the aforementioned book and changed the format? It was the strangest thing to see!

Great book, guys. Can't wait to read the second volume!

4 people found this helpful

Luke Carroll

Fascinating but may make people want to punch you

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 July 2009

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As others have said, this book will turn you into a fact-spewing geek for a few weeks. It's very interesting and enlightening but you also realise that all the things it's telling you will just make you sound like a smart arse should you try and tell anyone else about it.

It's also true that a lot of the facts rely on fake questions or answers that rely on technicalities. For every few questions that's like "What's the driest place on Earth?" which is followed by a suitably surprising yet factually correct answer - a logical pairing of straight question and straight answer - there's a question that misleads you or an answer that feels rather smug; the QI equivalent of saying "Which hand is the 10p coin in?" when it is, in fact, in neither hand (or as this book would have it, "It's not actually a coin because..." or "These aren't actually hands because...")

That said, it can be really hard to put down, though is also great for quick little reads (perhaps while you're on the toilet or waiting for the kettle to boil) since it's obviously broken up into questions rather than large chapters.

Just do your friends and family a favour by keeping your newly found wealth of knowledge to yourself. Maybe lend them the book rather than trying to recite it to them (easier than it sounds, believe me).

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QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition (Qi: Book of General Ignorance 1) Kindle Edition

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About the authors

John Mitchinson

John Lloyd

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