"Until recently Mr. Hodgman was the undisputed master of making up facts, his previous books being nothing more than wonderful miscellanies of falseness. Since he is no longer dominate in this field it only makes sense that he would try his hand at writing a book of 'non-fiction.' These essays are both funny (I chuckled out loud on a number of occasions) and poignant in their honesty about what it's like to grow older with bad facial hair and a fear of buses."
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication Date 2018-05-29
Section New Titles - Paperback / Biography / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Brad L.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780735224827
Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn’t seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now.
Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them.
Vacationland collects these real-life wanderings, and through them you learn of the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, and which animals to keep as pets and which to kill with traps and poison. There is also some advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god.
Though wildly, Hodgmaniacally funny as usual, it is also a poignant and sincere account of one human facing his forties, those years when men in particular must stop pretending to be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weird dads that they are.
