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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

"VACATIONLAND" IS A pointless little book. That's a compliment. Pointless little books used to be more of a thing. I have shelves full of them from the '30s, '40s, '50s and '60s, written by the likes of James Thurber, Anita Loos and Bennett Cerf, with titles like "The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze," "A Girl Like I" and "Try and Stop Me." These books had no urgent need to exist. They were neither topical nor essential. They were simply an opportunity to spend time with a good storyteller, a droll soul with the skills to turn even the flimsiest bits of real-life anecdotage into pleasurable reading material. Here is John Hodgman, having inherited his parents' modest weekend home in rural western Massachusetts, on discovering propane: "I didn't know what that giant white metal Tylenol out in the backyard was for. I thought it was just some weird personal submarine my father had collected. But that is not what it is: It is a propane tank. If you want it to be full of propane, you have to call the Gas Daddy. And if you do not call him, the Gas Daddy will not come." "Vacationland" is consistently amusing in this dry, almost Dada way, though misleadingly titled and subtitled; it's not a travelogue or even much of a themed collection. The loose organizing principle is that Hodgman, now in his mid-40s, has stumbled toward something resembling competent homeownership over the last decade or so, first by taking care of the aforementioned Massachusetts house and later by purchasing a home in Maine, where his wife spent her childhood summers. But the book isn't particularly faithful to this premise, veering offinto vignettes about delivering a "Samuel Clemens Address" at a Southern college despite knowing little about Mark Twain, getting into a "midlife marijuana research" phase and growing up as a willfully pretentious only child and misfit in the Boston suburb of Brookline. ("I do not know why I was not bullied more. I think I may have presented too many hate targets for bullies to get a bead on.") Hodgman likes to refer to himself as a "famous minor television personality," having achieved a measure of recognition as a contributor to "The Daily Show" and as the hapless PC to Justin Long's groovy Mac in those Apple ads from the late aughts. He has since built himself into a cottage industry, with his "Judge John Hodgman" podcast (and corresponding column in The New York Times Magazine), his million-plus followers on Twitter and his three pretend-authoritative compendiums of fake trivia, "The Areas of My Expertise," "More Information Than You Require" and "That Is All." The real hook of "Vacationland" is that it's the first book in which Hodgman is playing it relatively straight, writing not as the professorially pompous hoot-owl "John Hodgman" character but as the actual fella with that name. Fortunately, Hodgman is a good enough writer to stand on his own talent and not on the old "You'll like my book because I'm on TV" trick. He describes with tender melancholy his parents' old life at their Massachusetts weekend house (situated by a bog in the Pioneer Valley, a region comparatively less posh and scenic than the Berkshires to the west), with its unambitious rituals of smoking, watching movies and eating creamed chipped beef, occasionally livened up with outings to "look at some old junk for sale in barns" or to go to "that one falling-down hotel on the Mohawk Trail that served day drinks to the snowmobilers and had those sausages that we liked." Hodgman and his wife appropriate these rhythms as adults. Then they have kids and are "forced to acknowledge that the house had an outside." When they get their place in Maine, the Hodgmans commit the classic mistake of inadvertently placing the winning bid on something at a charity auction, which is why they now own, despite not having harbored an urgent desire for it, a handmade wooden rowboat known as a peapod. "Vacationland" is mostly good fun in this pointless-little-book way - and acutely bourgeois in its subject matter. Hodgman acknowledges this, noting that these essays were developed as spoken-word pieces in the basement performance space of Union Hall in Brooklyn, and that his musician- writer friend John Roderick once took the stage after one of Hodgman's monologues and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the white privilege comedy of John Hodgman." That's a funny line, and it would have been fine if Hodgman had leftthings there. But late in the book he ties himself up in knots of guilt for taking on the subjects he has while Black Lives Matter protests are occurring and for logging days of leisure in 94-percent-white Maine, where "if I closed my laptop, I could make it all vanish." His once-over-lightly reflections on his privilege, while tonally consistent with the rest of "Vacationland" ("Even after a summer in Maine, at the tannest I would ever get, you could see the blue veins in my forearms, so thin is the skin of my people"), just don't come off, no matter how nobly intended. This isn't a matter of "Hey, comedian! Stick to comedy!" Rather, it's that these thoughts seem like fodder for a completely different kind of John Hodgman book, one he clearly has the intellectual and observational acuity to write, and even to inject some humor into: righteously pointed, as opposed to amiably pointless. This isn't the professorial hoot-owl 'John Hodgman' character, but the actual fella with that name. DAVID KAMP is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.

Hodgman, a writer, comedian, and actor brought to prominence by The Daily Show and TV ads for Apple, wrote three funny, best-selling books, including That Is All (2011), brimming with fake facts and invented history. But now that we're adrift in a sea of lies and Hodgman has reached his forties that alarming midpoint he offers, instead, a piquant travelogue of his long slog toward adulthood. With his signature poker-faced humor, hilarious self-deprecation, and imaginatively audacious mischief, Hodgman recounts altered states, travel misadventures, and, at two summer homes one formerly owned by his parents in rural Massachusetts, the other on his wife's home turf of Maine battles with nature (raccoon and mouse poop), technology (a septic system, propane), and unnervingly reticent neighbors. With funny tales of fatherly ineptness, a dissection of Maine humor, scouring commentary on white-male privilege, comic theories about facial hair, a tribute to a famous yet reclusive writer, and reflections on his mother's death, Hodgman is a disarmingly witty storyteller, at once waggish and incisive, droll and tender. Indeed, deep feelings flow beneath the mirth.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

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. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.