ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- I wanted to hate Ken Jennings.

Jennings is the man who won 74 consecutive "Jeopardy!" games in 2004. I am a man who, leading on his only appearance, blew a Final Jeopardy question -- and the game -- in 1987.

Jennings won $2.5 million. I won a pair of his-and-her watches and a home exercise contraption, along with a half-dozen bags of dried prunes, a can of Pledge and a year's supply of Pepsodent.

(My experience on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," though entertaining, wasn't much more financially beneficial: I walked away with $1,000 after missing the $32,000 question.)

So when I first picked up Jennings' book, "Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs" (Villard), I wanted to hate him.

But I can't. In fact, I like Ken Jennings. He handled his "Jeopardy!" fame with an easy grace and modesty, characteristics also evident in his book. (Jennings dots the book with trivia questions; can you answer them?)

Jennings could have written a quickie chronicle of his rise to "Jeopardy!" fame and riches, but "Brainiac" is much more -- it's a look at trivia as a hobby, as a business, as a fascination for millions, from solitary bar denizens poking at computer keyboards to the residents of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, home of "The World's Largest Trivia Contest." (Disclosure: It's also full of familiar names to me, even a couple of acquaintances, since I've been part of the trivia subculture for more years than I'd like to admit.)

"You have to have social fuel," Jennings, 32, says in an interview in the glass-walled confines of the CNN.com break room, where he is, once again, on display to onlookers. "Much useful knowledge doesn't live up to that."

But trivia, he says, can provide a quick bond between strangers in an airport, or minglers at a cocktail party.

"It can lubricate social interaction," he says. "I like to see it as a way to build bridges."

Even before "Ask Me Another!", there were English commonplace books, John Timbs' miscellanies (including the 1856 "Things Not Generally Known," a huge best-seller in its day), Albert Southwick's "Quizzism" and "Ripley's Believe It or Not," which began in 1918.

Jennings was already familiar with a number of these works -- he recalls devouring "Believe It or Not" paperbacks, the "Guinness Book" and quiz shows while growing up in Washington state, South Korea and Singapore -- and also played on Brigham Young University's quiz bowl team. But before writing "Brainiac," he says, "I knew nothing [about trivia history and subcultures] going in."

"I learned it from the ground up. I called friends, networked ... it turned into criss-crossing the country," he says.

Among his stops were the college campuses where, Jennings writes, "an alphabet soup" of quiz organizations exists (there are at least four, each with fierce partisans); the aforementioned Stevens Point, which devotes 54 hours to its town-wide trivia game; and the Sacramento, California, home of Fred Worth.

Worth wrote his three "Trivia Encyclopedias" before the age of the personal computer and the Internet, and is dismissed by some trivia experts as "Fred L. Worthless" because of errors in his works. He's now more forgotten than esteemed -- despite providing the raw material for hundreds of Trivial Pursuit questions (a fact he sued the game's creators over, and lost).

"Nobody knows who he is anymore," says Jennings.

In some ways, Worth is a prophet without honor, Jennings observes; not only did he lose the Trivial Pursuit suit -- and the riches it would have brought -- but he's also seldom acknowledged by today's trivia aficionados.

"I think he felt bad," Jennings says. "He's never been a question, and he's never been a phone-a-friend [on 'Millionaire']."

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Source: www.checkfreshnews.com

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