The skeleton of the narrative is about a young freelance journalist who trips and falls into the world of memory training and memory competition. But as stupid fun as that is––a self-deprecating normal person doing truly geek-intensive things is staggeringly amusing, turns out––and as many memory techniques as I learned, the joy of the book is in all the ruminations about memory, intelligence, education, expertise, commitment, and what it means to live as a function of our memory. The last book that truly changed my awareness, i.e. what I deemed worthy of attention, was The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In a way much less content specific than Ominvore’s, but just as prickly to my conscience, I feel fortunate to have read this book and its reminder that “how we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory.” A
