Another one of these radical life experiments (like AJ Jacobs spending a year trying to live out, by the letter, every rule in the Bible) yields a book on the experience of reading the entire OED over the course of a year.

Months in, Shea arrives — back-aching, crabby, page-blind — at Chapter N. “Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language,” he writes, his verbal cortex overflowing. “It is,” he observes, “like trying to remember all the trees one sees through the window of a train.” Once he stares for a while, amazed, at the word glove. “I find myself wondering why I’ve never seen this odd term that describes such a common article of clothing.”

By Chapter O there is evidence of further disintegration. Is he turning into, he wonders, one of the “Library People”? The bag-toters and mutterers who spend all their time there? “Sometimes I get angry at the dictionary and let loose with a muffled yell.” At night he hears a deep, disembodied voice slowly intoning definitions.

But then, thank goodness, he breaks through into sunlight. In Chapter P he finds a rich harvest of words, including one, petrichor, that refers to the loamy smell that rises from the dry ground after a rain, and a nicely dense indivisible word, prend, that refers to a mended crack. He notes these down in his big ledger book. He attends a lexicographical congress in Chicago, where he is misunderstood by his colleagues, and returns to the Hunter library basement with renewed vigor. He tells his tolerant girlfriend about a rare P-word and then wonders aloud if he is boring her. “The point at which I became bored has long since passed,” Alix replies.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that markets and agents who suggest this stuff to their writers keep special wings of medical services staff on hand to coax these poor souls back to reality from their bizarre literary stunts.