Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches - Hardcover

An Amazon Best Book of November 2017: In Vacationland, John Hodgman describes an afternoon he spent building cairns – those steeple-shaped piles of stones you see along hiking trails. He’s with a friend, the jazz musician Jonathan Coulton, who has a knack for this kind of thing. But Hodgman’s first cairns are “ass”: “Naturally,” he says, “I went for the big rocks, the showy ones with flashy colors and boss marbling. I hauled them out of the mud as if strength mattered even for a second in cairn building and used them as the base for huge, high monuments to overthink ... And then I would step back and see how terrible they were.” Just when a metaphor for the writing process begins to seem obvious, Hodgman lets his grand creation fall. “Oh, I forgot to mention: we were high out of our minds.” Throughout Vacationland, Hodgman strikes a delicately calibrated, seemingly artless balance of pathos and humor. A memoir, of any sort, by a man whose success as an actor, podcaster, and writer (of the Complete World Knowledge trilogy) allows him to own not just one, but two vacation homes, seems fated to evoke resentment, but though he may be fulfilling his “Caucasian class destiny in the most loathsome way possible,” the book never feels braggy. Hodgman is self-deprecating, disarming, and funny, and readers will leave Vacationland feeling that the privilege was theirs. —Sarah Harrison Smith, The Amazon Book Review

John Hodgman is a writer, comedian, and actor. He is the author of three New York Times bestselling books—The Areas of My Expertise, More Information Than You Require, and That Is All. After an appearance to promote his books on The Daily Show, he was invited to return as a contributor, serving as the show’s “Resident Expert” and “Deranged Millionaire.” This led to an unexpected and, frankly, implausible career in front of the camera. He has performed comedy for the president of the United States, at a TED conference, and in a crypt in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. He is the host of the popular Judge John Hodgman podcast, in which he settles serious disputes between real people, such as “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” He also contributes a weekly column under the same name for The New York Times Magazine.