When I was a little girl, my favorite book was an illustrated children's encyclopedia that had everything smooshed together higgledy-piggeldy. I especially remember that on the cover there was an astronaut, and hovering menacingly over him was a brain cell. I spent hours reading that thing, finding all kinds of odd bits of knowledge.

"Pick Me Up" reminds me of that encyclopedia. Its information is higgeldy piggeldy smooshed together.

What's different about it, though, is that it's a hypertext book. When it's talking about a topic and refers to something else available in the book, it underlines the reference and gives you a page number. So, for instance, on page 194 you'll see an entry about democracy:

A democracy is a political system, first thought up by the ancient Greeks 240.

Turn to page 240 and you'll find info about the ancient Greeks. You may be thinking "Hypertext? huh?" but you're reading hypertext right now. The HTTP in a web address stands for "hypertext transfer protocol," after all. Which means that yes, "Pick Me Up" is basically a website in print form.

And like many a website, its graphics are flashy and its information is shallow. Not that shallow is bad; by "shallow" I mean that most topics are dealt with briefly--a few sentences on a page at best. But the point of the book is not so much to be encyclopedic as to show the interconnections among things, and to give readers a taste of many different topics rather than a full course meal of any one.

For a taste:
http://kiddk.com/static/html/pickmeup/

Lynn Siprelle, Editor