Summary of All Knowledge

I know “Summary of All Knowledge” sounds like an inhuman undertaking, and perhaps a bit pretentious, but the keyword is “summary.” In his wildly popular 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson attempted something similar. However, Bryson’s book focused more on a history of the universe, and how it came to be.

For this project, I’d like to focus more on general knowledge. One way to do that is to use a broad classification system to organize all of the information, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification. The Dewey Decimal Classification organizes all books (knowledge) into ten broad categories. Each of the broad categories is divided into ten subcategories, which are then divided again into ten topics in each subcategory. That’s about 1,000 topics covering what is basically all of human knowledge.

I’d like to write about each of these 1,000 topics, and give an overview of the basics of each topic. I can also call out the aspects of each topic that I find the most interesting and important to know. The final product would probably be something like an encyclopedia, summarized into a single readable volume.