Craig Glenday (editor-in-chief), Guinness World Records 2016, Self-published, 256pp., $29.45 (hbk), ISBN: 9781910561010
This book is, of course, officially amazing, and you will be reading it while standing upon a Guinness World Record: Australia is the largest island-continent on the planet, with the largest monolith at Uluru. You can read it to be amazed, or you can read it to become informed, or you can read it to become formidably trivial, or you can read it as a history of what inspires us and what no longer inspires us. Guinness WR, for instance, will no longer monitor how many worms you can eat in a minute, though you can still do tyre burnouts at ‘horsepower parties’. This pastime is popular in Canberra, where a record of 35 cars produced burning rubber in front of 20 witnesses on new year’s day 2015. This book proves you can still abseil at 105 and confirms that Charles Trippay once posted 2,200 vlogs on YouTube without missing a day. Voyager 1, which left our planet in 1977 is now more than 20 billion kms away, well beyond the pull of the sun’s gravity, and still transmitting information back from an emptiness we can barely imagine. One day this book will break a world record for the number of printed annuals in a series without interruption. All this proves there is no end to numbers and records. You have a year’s reading ahead of you with this amazing book. Recommended for ages 5 to 105.
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy