Thing explainer : complicated stuff in simple words

This is both a great book, and a frustrating book. The highly detailed illustrations were wonderful, the stick figure comments were as always, lots of fun. But - its frustrating. For example, as someone who has a good idea of how a cell works, I couldn't figure out just what everything was! But, on

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things that I had absolutely no knowledge on, such as the Nuclear Plant, it was great, because it totally made sense, without all the big words.

It was fun to figure out what the different parts of things were actually called - but at times, it was described too simply. Of course, this isn't a book meant to meant to teach people about how things work with the correct terminology.

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I liked the idea of this book more than I liked actually reading it. The diagrams made understanding complicated machines and processes easier, but the choice to use only the 10,000 most common words in English got in the way a bit. I think having a subtitle with the technical words for things

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might've helped, but it would've also wrecked the whole thing. I'm not really sure who a book like this is for. For nearly all children it is too difficult to understand some of the roundabout descriptions, so they wouldn't know what the things were that were being explained, or understand enough for the explanations to be useful. For adults like me who already know the terminology and have a vague understanding of the mechanisms, the obfuscated language gets in the way. For adults who know quite a lot about the mechanisms, the book would be dull but it might also be slightly funny, I guess?

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What's really interesting about this book is not the things that are explained or even that they are easier to understand, it is the words Randall Munroe chooses to explain them. Having limited himself to the 1000 most used words in English, he still has quite a few words to choose from and I found

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the words he chose very interesting. I also found it interesting that words that I would have thought were used a lot aren't showing up in the book. "Liquid" for example, is a word I would have expected to be in the list, but after a quick internet search, I find it's not.

Kudos to Munroe - this was, I think, rather a harder task than it first appears.

The book is heavily oriented to explanations of technological devices like rocket ships and microwave ovens, but it's interesting to read even if you're not that interesting in what is being explained. The art will be familiar to everyone who knows XKCD and familiar stick figures appear here and there.

This is not a book to read in one sitting, but it is very worth reading, and if you're so inclined setting yourself the challenge of explaining something you understand with Munroe's list of words.

If you own a copy, another fun thing to do would be to try to label the items Munore described - I found myself pausing to think things like "Oh, that's mitochondria." Don't scribble all over a library copy though, but you already knew that.

Definitely worth reading

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This is a book for a bright 6-10 year old who wants to learn more about how things work...and for adults who don't mind a little whimsy with their science and technology. The little side drawings add considerable humor to the challenge of explaining complex objects (some more complex than you'd

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think at first) in basic English words. The occasional everyday item that's explained could be very helpful for parents suddenly challenged by a serious question posed by an inquisitive child. (How many people actually know how the box that cleans food holders really works?) The introduction where Monroe explains why he choose to write the book this way is revealing and poses a question to many people who use jargon at all times.

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In the spirit of Thing Explainer, this word thing is getting done in simple words using simple writer.

It was… not not like a school book, to tell the truth. A lot of blue pictures with lots of information and tiny words everywhere. I don’t think it would teach you anything unless you already

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understand the ideas -- they’re not simple blue pictures; they’re blue pictures with lots of information, written in simple language.

With that said, it’s a fun read. It makes you see things in a new way… and half the fun is trying to figure out what the hell Munroe’s talking about. What is a key lock? It’s used to keep things locked up, but what does it really do? It checks the shape of a piece of metal, and opens for the right shape; so it's really a “shape checker.”

My favorites were the US Laws of the Land (especially the “serious office” branch!) and the Pieces Everything is Made Of.

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I respect Munroe’s premise here: explore complicated things (from science to machines) using only drawings and a thousand (“ten hundred”) common words. He doesn’t explain much, he mostly labels the parts (i.e. it’s more anatomy than physiology). And via that premise, the labels are never

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the actual names, so with topics I wasn’t familiar with I mostly 1) wondered what he was talking about and 2) wished I knew the thing’s actual name so I could google it and learn about it on my own. (For example: “{room of} water that keeps the {sky toucher} from falling over”; from his illustration, I conceived some appropriate nouns and when I googled “skyscraper ballast,” I got some relevant hits.) The periodic table of the elements is a hot mess.

I appreciated Munroe’s positivity and playfulness and tried to play along. A few times, I noticed my brain twisting to unlearn something and to grasp the simplicity of a thing, and I thought that might be good for it. I rated the book 3.5 stars but I liked it a lot less.

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This was really fun to read. It worked best when I had a working knowledge of the thing he was explaining so I could appreciate the cleverly simplified word choice and humor, but even on things I didn't understand, Munroe's explanations were fun. Is it a thorough explanation of the science behind

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these inventions? No. It's not meant to be a textbook. It's meant to be a way to play with science and language and make intimidating concepts more accessible. I think my students will get a kick out of this one.

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I found it to be more of a thing described.

Awful book. Left with almost no usable information. Just a bunch of silly simple synonyms for terms that might be useful if he cared to reveal them.

Fun drawings of everyday objects and other types of things, with xkcd-style explanations written using the "ten hundred" most common English words. No, you're not going to learn a lot of new stuff, but the explanations are humorous.

I didn't devour this like I did What If? – in fact if the date started on Goodreads is anything to go by, it took me just over a year to read.

But I've enjoyed dipping in and out of this over the last 12 months; the simplification of language does get a bit much if you push on through too many

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pages in one go – and when it gets to something you might actually be familiar with, the gag can actually serve to obscure the meaning.

That said, the conceit is great, I learnt a lot (my favourite entry is the slightly left-field one on the US Constitution) and the gags are as cleverly stupid as you'd expect from Randall Munroe ("If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today", indeed).

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Things make so much more sense.

If you love science...this is a must read book!

As expected, it's a great book. If you like xkcd (or just like understanding things), I can wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Absolutely loved this book. If you read xkcd, read this. I found myself trying to figure out the official words/names of things that he's explained in the ten hundred words most commonly used in the English language. And looking for the little people, duh.

I have enjoyed Randall Munroe's books and comics for quite a while now. And this was no exception. As someone who teaches English to non-native speakers, I really loved this idea of being able to explain things without knowing the technical words.

The two other books he has published, "What If?" and

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"How To" both end up taking things to an extreme, so this did have a bit of a different feel because it stuck to explaining how things are. Though, his style of humor is still fully present.

My main reason for not giving it 4 stars (I'd give 4.5 if I could) is because sometimes, even if the word for something was in his list of 1,000 words, he still chose to give it a name using other words. Which, while fits his style of humor, I felt did detract something from it.

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I like the diagrams, I thing this would be so much better if it didn't limit its vocabulary. Or at least have the words in brackets and the the simple words explaining the hard words.

This must have been a bitch to edit.

I bought this sight unseen (or asked for it on my xmas list anyway) based on my adoration for his first book What If? Thing Explainer is much shorter - only 60 pages - and the concept is very cool; explain how some of the most common things work.

What I didn't

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realise is that Munroe went into this book determined to use only the "top 10 hundred" words used in the English language (he determined this based on a number of factors, which he explains at the end of the book, in the section where he lists all the words). He explains why he chose to do this at the beginning of the book.

I love the concept and it doesn't sound like that big a deal on the surface of it; until you actually try to read how, say, a dishwasher works and it's titled "Box that Cleans Food Holders" or the page that explains how the "Big Tiny Thing Hitter" works (that's a particle collider to you and I). It's sort of fun trying to figure out what some of the entries are but reading the whole thing becomes rather tedious and ultimately I skimmed through it, reading bits here and there and laughing at the little comic asides that make me such a fan of Munroe. Some of the entries though, would be a great start at explaining some of the easier concepts to small kids (there's an entry for a tree, for example). I especially love his explanation of the Constitution of the United States.

Ultimately, it's a fun book, but I would have loved this book had he written it in this same style, but didn't try to limit himself to just the 1000 most common words (which oddly enough do not include "nine").

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It's like xkcd.com got serious, funny, exact and serious all at once.