Encyclopedic

I was an avid reader, as a kid. One of my friends derided me behind my back once, saying “He’s always got his nose in books” which I took as a compliment.

One of my favorite pastimes was to select a volume out of the set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf (many moons before the days of the ubiquitous internet and things like Wikipedia) and read through it, cover to cover, in one sitting. I would sometimes do this on nice sunny days when (theoretically) I should have been running around outdoors.

A game I loved playing was the Dictionary Game, which involved 3 or more people and a dictionary (in English). One person would open the dictionary to a random page, pick out a word that assumedly everybody knows, tell the other players the first letter of the word, and read the definition. The others would attempt to guess the word, and if someone was successful that person would take control of the dictionary. Otherwise the original person retained the dictionary and would find another word. The trick was to find words that are commonly known but are not easy to guess by the definition.