AJ Jacobs has rapidly become one of my favorite authors. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and love Jacobs' wit and journalistic style. Highly recommeded for anyone who enjoys humor and/or interesting information...Everyone who dislikes laughing and learning should really avoid this book

Saw this on Stephen Colbert and it seemed like it would be an amusing read. It is indeed humorous, even laugh out loud funny in parts. Jacobs' has a keen eye for popular culture and his intertwining of those observations with more serious matters lends a style that is quite engaging.

Yes, it's light-hearted and his "experiments" are obviously vehicles to generate comic material. But, there's more going on here. You can definitely read this as a serious review and critique of various ethics and self improvement topics. Even the experiments that aren't specifically about self improvement contain bits of introspection about human behavior that border on profundity. I found myself ricocheting from laughter to contemplation. So much of popular non-fiction is affected with a bewildering sense of self-importance with hundreds of pages of filler around a single idea that would be a worthy subject of a magazine article, but shouldn't have been expanded to book length (I'm looking at you Malcolm Gladwell). For me, at least, a book like this that presents a variety of those kinds of ideas is an excellent way to learn about those topics. Jacobs' critical assessment and humorous observations on various lifestyle issues can be counted on to be revealing about the true benefits of the techniques and entertaining at the same time. This might be a worthwhile new genre in non fiction.

Oh, by the way, I wrote this because I like seeing my words on amazon.com.

A few smiles. Beach reading at best. If you have the time for a good book,
it's a waste of it.

As another reviewer pointed out, many of the essays in this collection have already been published, so if you are a die-hard A.J. Jacobs follower you might already have seen them. That being said, I hadn't read them and was, for the most part, very happy with discovering them for the first time. I love Mr. Jacobs writing style, witty, a bit self-depricating yet letting a little intelligence shine through as well. One of my favorite things about all of his 'experiments' is that he comes away from the experience having learned something, not just a little factual tidbit but some sort of life lesson he shares with the reader, about himself or thoughts on life in general. My one complaint with this collection is that a couple of the essays have a book-reportish quality to them, in that too many articles/other sources are quoted and the material seems to just parrot back what others have already said. Still definitely worth checking out though I would recommend reading his other two, full-length books to get a true appreciation of this author!
** on a Kindle note, the pictures are not at all clear so that was disappointing but certainly not a deal breaker

I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Jacob's "The Know It All" and although it was not as brilliant, found "The Year of Living Biblically" to be a good read. While these both took place over the course of an entire year, his new book, "The Guinea Pig Diaries", is made up of smaller experiments, most lasting a month, which act like appetizers. I almost felt like these were the treatments for other books he planned to write but when he couldn't come up with enough material, decided to make them shorter experiments and thus shorter chapters. Unfortunately the reader gets shortchanged in the process. Many of the experiments while they have potential, never develop much like they would have had the experiments been longer. Just when I am getting into the experiment, it ends, leaving me unfulfilled. I would rather have the full meal.

Don't get me wrong, many of the experiments are funny, I especially liked the one when he went to the Oscars as the young actor from "Shine" and also enjoyed the one where he had to do everything his wife asked, but others such as acting like a his nanny in an on-line dating service and when he tried to live by George Washington's morals, had potential that never seemed to reach it.

I know many of the stories were available on his website, having been articles in Esquire, but I feel like this is an attempt to placate the masses until his next, better book comes out, cashing in on the success of the other experiments. Although an entertaining book, much like an appetizer it just leaves you hungry for more. I will anxiously be awaiting that book and hope it is better than this one.