Vacationland
Ratings30
Average rating4.1
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.
Source: https://www.booksontape.com/book/557020/vacationland/
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I love the sardonic wit and deep insights of this book by John Hodgman. I am familiar with him from the Sunday NYT Magazine so I was looking forward to reading this book and was not disappointed. The memoir of sorts is about his wanderings in NYC, MA and the ME coast. Beneath the wit is an touching honesty about the reminiscences of his past and what the future holds for him as he ages. I could not live with a man like this 24/7 but he is a hoot if taken in small doses.
I sat on this book for a while. From what I heard from all the author's interviews, this was a personal recalling of his awkward youth. I haven't been in the mood to read semi-serious confessions about a weird family. Once I started reading it, I realized I looked at the book in the wrong light. Part of the book is stories about growing up in a unique family. And part of the stories are about the author's awkward youth. Turns out all the stories are hilarious
Mr. Hodgman is a particularly good writer and knows how to tell a good story. The book was a delight. I recommend it.
I stayed up way too late reading Vacationland. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Very much a paper version of John Hodgman. Not only goofy weirdness for the sake of weirdness, there are a few threads that tie everything together and make some larger points. (But it's very much the goofy weirdness of the descriptive details that make his writing so enjoyable.)
