“What if…?” is a totally ridiculous idea for a book and pretty much perfect because of it. The concept is asking all kinds of silly questions and seeing where they go. For example, what if a the earth suddenly stopped spinning? (Spoiler alert: it’s not good.)

There’s a beauty to both asking and taking the time to answer “absurd hypothetical questions.” It’s one of those things you’ll either “get” or you’ll think is utterly stupid. (Check out the reviews on Goodreads if you have any doubt.) To be fair, the people in the latter camp are probably not wrong but they’d be missing a lot of fun.

Will you learn anything from this book? A qualified yes. Yes in the sense that you’ll learn the odds of getting full marks on the SATs and the practicality of the human computer in “The Three-Body Problem“. But it’s not a pop-science book in the sense that there’s nothing useful in it.

And, frankly, that’s what I love about it.