Been dying for a tell-all comprehensive look at The Simpsons? Well, your prayers have been answered with The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family.

I've been watching The Simpsons since it premiered on Fox back in 1989. I used to watch them on The Tracey Ullman Show. I watched the Christmas Special when it premiered. Heck, I even watch the reruns in syndication and I've bought the videotapes. The way I saw it, I knew everything there was to know about The Simpsons. That was until The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family was published.

Published by HarperPerrenial, The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family provides more Simpsons information than you can shake an inanimate carbon rod at. With synopses, secret plot elements, and character bios, The Simpsons Guide contains nearly everything you need to know about Springfield, USA. I know I spent hours browsing it and laughing out loud over all the great moments from episodes past, before realizing that I still had to write this review.

Episode By Episode
In layman's terms, The Simpsons Guide is a compendium, a collection of synopses from all the episodes of The Simpsons. In fact, each episode receives its own page, but the book ends up being so much more. In his introduction to the book, Matt Groening refers to the compendium as the Encyclopedia Simpsonica, and he isn't too far off the mark.

For every episode, there is a brief, three-paragraph plot description. Thank the maker they are brief. We all know what the episodes are about. (Don't lie, you know you know.) Then we get into the meat of the information. For those of us who want to know every detail about each episode, about 70 percent of every page is dedicated to information not readily available: the best quotes from characters, details you never noticed before, and things you would never observe such as inside jokes and other production information. For example, ever wonder why Michael Jackson was never credited for performing the voice of Leon Kompowsky? It's in the book! You can find Bart's chalkboard quotes, lyrics to songs, and cool images from the episodes.

An episode's primary guest character is introduced in a sidebar with a short bio. They cover everyone from Mindy Simmons to the Bumblebee Man to Mr. Sparkle. In addition to the character info, the bio provides production notes. For example, every character has the celebrity name who provided the guest voice for him/her.