Vacationland

True Stories from Painful Beaches

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Vacationland

By: John Hodgman

Narrated by: John Hodgman

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About this listen

“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.

Entertainment & Celebrities

North America

United States

Celebrity

Maine

Comedy

Wilderness

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If you know and like John Hodgman, this is a good book. If you don't, then it is still good, but I think at times his attitudes could be misconstrued, his humour is dry and self-deprecating and he has a clear awareness of his own character and the privilege he experiences and talks frankly of them.

Not being American I didn't see their Apple PC Ads (in which John Hodgman played the PC) when they aired and so my first introduction to John Hodgman was through his appearances as a deranged millionaire on the Daily Show. This led me to his first book, which led me to the audiobooks of fake facts and then his podcast. Eventually I saw the ads and enjoyed them too.

Of all of these versions of John Hodgman (all to some degree made-up) this book feels closest to the podcast, which is hardly surprising because, the podcast is his wisdom and thoughts and often includes glimpses into his life, and this book is full of stories from his life, true ones.

I adored the fake facts books but I grew to admire and love John Hodgman through his podcast, this book shares more of the things I love, his honesty and awareness of the unfairness of the world, his often poetic yet realistic descriptions of the world, his love for his family and, possibly most important, his weird dadness.