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Title details for Vacationland by John Hodgman - Available

Vacationland

True Stories from Painful Beaches

by John Hodgman
John Hodgman
Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 2 copies available
“I love everything about this hilarious book except the font size.” —Jon Stewart
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 25, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525497707
      • File size: 155487 KB
      • Duration: 05:23:55

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      It's no surprise that an audiobook by humorist John Hodgman is funny. More surprising, though, are the emotional depths Hodgman reaches in this assortment of essays. Hodgman is known for his work on "The Daily Show" and as the stodgy personification of a PC in Apple's "Get a Mac" commercials. He brings the expected dose of sardonic humor to his narration but is also a gifted storyteller. With expert timing and pacing, he explores the foibles and malaise of middle age, in turn lampooning his own perspective of "white privilege." ("The central conflict of my life and this audiobook is this: I OWN TWO SUMMER HOMES.") This John Hodgman is more bittersweet than his comedic personas but also more compelling for those who appreciate some hard truths within their comedy. A.T.N. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      January 1, 2018

      This represents humorist, podcaster, and former Daily Show contributor Hodgman's first venture into nonfiction after three books of "fake trivia." Here, Hodgman drops his customary voice of deranged authority for a much more personal, but no less funny, memoir. This set of stories about his youth in Massachusetts and his move in middle age to a small town in Maine can turn on a dime from absurd fish-out-of-water small-town adventures to surprisingly affecting meditations on mortality. Hodgman demonstrates that he's capable of turning his wit upon any target, including himself, with both skill and compassion. It's impossible to imagine anyone else but the author narrating this audiobook, given his expertise as a podcaster and performer and the autobiographical nature of the material. The author's performance is intimate, conversational, and hilarious. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Hodgman's podcast or previous books who are interested in seeing a new side of the author; fans of intellectual humorists such as David Sedaris; and listeners interested in idiosyncratic travel memoirs. ["This comedic spin across life in the Northeast will be enjoyable for those who relish the travel disasters of others or comedic nonfiction": LJ 10/1/17 review of the Viking hc.]--Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta

      Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 28, 2017
      Mild departures from the routine inspire neurotic palpitations in these dourly funny essays by humorist Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise), who pegs his shaggy-dog stories to several unnerving locales. One is around his second home in rural Massachusetts, where he wrestles with anxiety about taking his garbage to the wrong town’s dump (the right dump is a longer drive), gets high and builds witchy cairns in a river, and fights a seesaw battle against raccoon droppings on his property and field mice in his kitchen. Other essays concern his postcollege arrival in New York, where he revels in sliding-scale-priced therapy with a trainee psychologist (“I could talk about jazz violin all day long and she was professionally obligated to listen thoughtfully and pretend to be interested”), and his horrifying Maine sojourns, featuring taciturn locals, insufferable summer people, and blighted confections (“Fudge is repulsive... like a dark, impacted colon blockage that a surgeon had to remove”). Recurring themes include the yearning for perpetual adolescence, the baffling burdens of adulthood (“Homeowners advice: do not put even a single box of stale Cheerios down the garbage disposal, never mind three”), and liberal self-loathing (“There is no mansplaining like white mansplaining”). Hodgman’s sketches ramble a while and then peter out, but the twists of mordant, off-kilter comedy make for entertaining excursions.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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