Marc Shapiro's What's Your X-files IQ?
Headline. Price: £5.99. ISN 0-7472-5940-2.

Review by Geoff Willmetts

The big question with this book, is how do you do a review where a book is page-to-page questions. All you really need to do, is watch each episode and you'll have enough information at your fingertips to answer the questions. If you're an X-Filoholic already, you'll probably have all the answers already. The truth is out there if you've been paying attention to the show. Oh, there are also sections devoted to the production side as well as Duchovny and Anderson. You're also give a few black and white photographs amongst the 1112 questions.

I have to admit to certain reservations about a book of this sort. The main one being the need to flick through to the answers to find out if you were right or wrong, you're likely to see the answers for the next section. This is a problem all such books have, so it's a general criticism and which any publisher never really finds a satisfactory solution.

Considering that it's supposed to indicate your IQ or knowledgeable you are about the X-Files, it seems odd that there isn't some sort of validation of how well you scored at the end. Come to that, there is no differentiation as to easy to difficult questions, you just have to get stuck in.

Summed up, this book isn't likely to please anyone but X-Filephiles, and then it might be treated as the basis for a quiz or verification of answers for same. If you're picking up everything related, then you'll be buying this without any prompting anyway..

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