I finished it! An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned But Probably Didn’t by Judy Jones and William Wilson is a monstrous book, and was much more fun to read than the title would lead you to believe.

Do you ever feel like you’ll never learn everything you should know? I do, all the time. I hear about something on the news, or see a book on a topic I know nothing about, and I get this little panicky feeling inside: I must learn this now! This book was the perfect bedside book for the past six months or so. I dipped into it a little bit most nights, and gobbled up the information.

The authors and other contributors present all the various bits of knowledge in layman’s terms, and with a dry wit that had me chuckling a few times. For instance, here’s what you should have learned about Herman Melville in high school:

That Moby-Dick is allegorical (the whale = Nature/God/the Implacable Universe; Ahab = Man’s Conflicted Identity/Civilization/Human Will; Ishmael = the Poet/Philosopher) and should be read as a debate between Ahab and Ishmael.

And in college:

That Melville didn’t know Moby-Dick was allegorical until somebody pointed it out to him. That his work prefigured some of Freud’s theories of the unconscious. That, like Lord Byron, Normal Mailer, and Bob Dylan, Melville spent most of his life struggling to keep up with the name he’d made for himself (with the bestselling Typee) before he turned thirty. And that if, historically, he was caught between nineteenth-century Romanticism and modern alienation, personally he was pretty unbalanced as well. He may or may not have been gay, as some biographers assert (if he was, he almost certainly didn’t know it), but whatever he was, Nathaniel Hawthorne eventually stopped taking his calls.

The book is divided into major sections: American Studies, Art History, Economics, Film, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Science, World History, and Lexicon. Within those sections, you have sub-sections with witty titles like: American Intellectual History, and Stop That Snickering: Eight American Intellectuals, The Leonardo/Michelangelo Crib Sheet, Remedial Watching for Chucky Fans, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Twelve Fictional Characters with Whom You Should Have at Least a Nodding Acquaintance, Separated at Creation? How to Tell the Balkans from the Caucasus, and Those Old-Time Religions: Divine to Some, Merely Fabulous to Others.