Introduction

“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.

Editorial Review

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

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