More Information Than You Require Adapted by John Hodgman

More Information Than You Require Adapted Reviews

• 
  Libbie Hawker (L.M. Ironside)

  I obtained this book and shipped it all the way out to a hot, dry, sandy Middle Eastern land which shall remain nameless because my boyfriend is maniacally protective of OPSEC, even when the OP is concluded and he's been home for several months (thankfully without PTSD...so far.) I won't even tell you which branch of the military he's in, except to say that it's the branch of the military that nobody ever remembers when discussing branches of the military, and to tell you that its official motto rhymes, appropriately, with "someone forgot us." Yes, those guys. Yes, they do deploy. For a really long time.
  
  All of this has nothing to do with John Hodgman's second hilarious book of false facts, except that it is noteworthy that this book, of all the books I sent him over nearly a year (and I sent a lot), was the only one to return home with him. The rest stayed behind in the base library for other service members to enjoy, but my boyfriend loved this book too much to part with it, or even to loan it to his shipmates...I mean...airplane-tank-humvee-helicopter-troop-predatorydrone-ship-mates. There. Covered my tracks. OPSEC is preserved once again, God bless America!
  
  As I had already read Hodgman's first hilarious book,
  The Areas of My Expertise, and thoroughly enjoyed it, I decided I had to read this one for myself, once I was able to pry it from Boyfriend's hands.
  
  More Information Than You Require lives up admirably to the initial offering, bringing yet more subtle, intelligent humor in the form of strange false facts that are so odd they just might be plausible. Hodgman is clearly a very smart fellow, as only a highly observant, fertile mind could observe the native weirdness of actual history, politics, and modern culture and concoct so many "factoids" that feel so dead-on. The book is a brainy skewering of the real world by means of examination of an unreal world, skillfully crafted for you by John Hodgman, one of the funniest guys ever.
  
  I recommend it to people who appreciate nerdy, smart humor, and I also recommend Hodgman's podcast, Judge John Hodgman, for a weekly dose of hilarious smarts.
  
  Enjoy!
• 
  Jamie

  You may remember that fairly recently comedian and minor TV personality John Hodgman wrote a parody of reference books called The Areas of My Expertise, which
  I reviewed. Hodgman's dry wit and ability to generate random and sublimely absurd claims made that book funny enough, so when he released his follow-up More Information Than You Require I grabbed it up.
  
  In just about every way, More Information is more of the same. Indeed, Hodgman even continues the page numbering from his prior book and claims that more volumes will follow, and that some day you will be able to combine them into some kind of Voltron-like omnibus full of jokes about hobos, mole men, and U.S. presidents with hooks for hands. The problem is, I feel like I've seen a lot of this before, and the freshness and absurdity of the first book is pretty worn off. As any carnival freak show owner who has spent too much time in one town will tell you, things get less absurd with repeat viewings. Hodgman even seems to be going back to the same well that watered his previous books. For example, instead of a list of 700 hobo names like in the first book, More Information the author includes an exhaustive list of mole men names, making use of pretty much the same kind of shtick.
  
  That's not to say that the book isn't funny in places. Hodgman's dry wit still hits hard on occasion, and I did laugh out loud more than a few times. Most of the jokes are hidden in the footnotes of the text, as well as 365 little dated inserts that he includes so that when you're done with the book you can use it as a "fact a day" daily calendar.
  
  The problem is that this is all starting to feel a little well worn. I also grew to hate Hodgman's habit of switching to all capital letters SEEMINGLY AT RANDOM throughout the BOOK, which was funny once or twice, but generally JUST BROKE UP THE FLOW and was ANNOYING. I'd like to see him tackle something in a little different style rather than than what seems to me to be stream of consciousness and joke making that just throws everything against the walls to see what sticks.
• 
  Alan

  A REVIEW, comprising two LISTS (one True and one False), of John Hodgman's
  More Information than You Require.
  
  List the first:
  1. It has nothing but kind things to say about modern-day troubador and Internet sensation
  Jonathan Coulton.
  2. Pages 296-299 are actually made from pressed prosciutto (in hardback; domestic bacon was used for the paperback edition, and the audiobook contains merely a bacon-scented backscratcher).
  3. Every copy of said hardback edition comes packaged with a hollowed-out boar's tusk, filled with the bright-red husks of the cochineal beetle, which may be used in lieu of blood for signing official contracts with Satan or his emissaries.
  4. Hodgman himself will read it to you happily in its entirety, if you should run across him in your local supermarket or organic electronics store and ask him politely using the secret code word on Page 316.
  5. Hodgman's photograph is a hologram, one layer of which contains a steganographic copy of the entire book encoded as a moiré pattern on Hodgman's suit, including the author photograph, one layer of which contains a moiré-encoded copy of the entire book... this recursive encoding causes a warping of space and time that has swallowed up several chain bookstores and at least one independent (but not
  Powell's).
  
  List the 2nd:
  1. It is wildly funny, with at least one chuckle on every page.
  2. It uses frequent EMPHASIS in the form of CAPITALIZATION and italics.
  3. It is a direct continuation of
  The Areas of My Expertise, with ongoing pagination and numbering of figures and tables.
  4. It has heavily influenced the format of this review.
  5. The determination of which list is TRUE and which FALSE has been left as an EXERCISE for the READER.
  
  
  THAT IS ALL
• 
  brian tanabe

  I am sooooo excited to get down to my local bookstore and pick this up. Hodgman's last book is brilliant and I am such a big fan of his intellect and wit. Can't wait.
  
  Update: Finished the book. Great stuff, but on this second time around (not in reading this particular book, but in me indulging in Hodgman's brilliance), I think I would prefer *watching* Hodgman perform this book rather than me slogging through this read.
• 
  Brendan

  The title of the book gives you a sense of its breadth and scope. Hodgman’s book is truly a COMPENDIUM OF WORLD KNOWLEDGE. There are lots of hilarious bits, but I’ll comment on just a few themes and ideas:
  
  * I love the continued numbering that puts this book in concert with the previous book, AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE. The last book in the series purports to be forthcoming: THAT IS ALL.
  * Throughout the book, JH has “this day in history” almanac entries. Here’s my favorite:
  August 7:
  1989, ATHENS: Archeologists discover that Plato’s famous allegory of the “Cave” was not just an allegory, but an actual cave where Plato had physically chained his students to rocks. They then were forced to watch his amazing shadow puppets until they either died or mustered the strength to cast off the illusion of their senses and sawed off their own feet to escape. Plato was a very sick man.
  * The number and breadth of the literary and cultural references at work in the book boggles. There’s a JAWS joke referring to the nickname of the shark (Bruce), references to Goethe and other philosophers, and plenty of conversation about Mole-men. JH regularly mixes fact and fiction to make a blend that’s just delightful.
  * One theme in this book is JH’s enormous wealth from his work as an Apple commercial personality. He keeps referring to his contentious relationship with Emo Philips and his friendship with “feral American” Jonathan Coulton. I would really enjoy moving in the circles JH does: among the people thanked at the end are Sarah Vowell, Ira Glass, Alex Bloomberg, Dana Gould, John Flansberg, Dave Eggers, and Dick Van Patten.
  
  Overall, the book is pretty entertaining if you enjoy short punches of humor. Or if you liked his last book. Or if you have a sense of humor.
• 
  Conor Ahern

  Alright, so I pretty much love John Hodgman. I love his imperiousness, his cocksure tendency to hold forth on all matter of esoteric subjects, his blustery blending of pure balderdash with true trivia that almost certainly leaves people thinking true things he's said were made up of whole cloth, and vice versa.
  
  I saw some other reviews of this book, and they lamented the tediousness of it. A lot of them had read the first of the books in this trilogy, and really, I can't imagine his schtick changes much. So I'm sympathetic. But this is the first one that I read all the way through (I may have read the first one a long time ago, or at least part of it), and I really liked it. That is, until the end. For some odd reason the last full quarter of the book repeated the blandest of the tropes, "On this day in [year]... blah blah blah happened" and I kept finding myself thinking "Good god, this still?" Not something you should find yourself thinking in a comedy book.
  
  But I would give this book 3.5 stars. Also, as this was the audiobook, the first half of it featured John Hodgman riffing with Jonathan Coulton, whose bed I once drunkenly slept in one New Year's Day with my friend Alice and her then boyfriend. They got to stay in his magnificent townhouse in Cobble Hill in exchange for taking care of the family's pet rat because they were all in the same a cappella troupe as Coulton at Yale, albeit separated by a decade's time (you know Ivy League rituals--so esoteric!). Also his house's motif was squid-themed.
• 
  Ericka Clou

  Slightly funnier than the first one,
  The Areas of My Expertise: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order. I especially enjoy the political jokes. Just as the first one was too heavy on fake "hobo" trivia, this one is too heavy on molemen. Um-hm, yeah.
• 
  Josh Gunderson

  More of an experience than an audio book. Last half is hours of It Happened Today In The Past (can skip though/sample), Ricky Gervais reading the quotes (not to be missed), then live recording of 700 Molemen names (also gets old).
• 
  Bill

  When reading a Hodgman book, you know exactly what you're getting into: a hilarious faux-almanac cooked up with a wealth of tweaked facts and imitation classed-up English. I will say, however, this time around I got a little weary of the "fact for a day" on each page. I get the gag, some of them were really good, but being a traditionalist (and kind of an asshole at times) I get a little burnt out on the "let me find a good stopping place on this page to read the little tidbit in the corner" routine. Also, the mole-man list in this book just doesn't stand up to hobo name list from his first.
  
  Still, having gotten my gripes out, I still giggled like a schoolgirl that just heard the word 'titmouse' when I read this book. The man is just plain funny, and in the end, isn't that what you're paying for?
• 
  Erica

  I enjoyed this book much more than its predecessor, The Areas of My Expertise, which I found amusing but got tired of fairly quickly. I was concerned the same thing would happen with More Information Than You Require as it is a continuation, starting on page 237 where the first book left off. However, although I could have skipped over the parts dealing with mole-men or "What to Expect While Serving on A Jury", I really enjoyed the stories which could actually have been about John Hodgman's life. Stories such as his encounter with a Charlie Chaplin impersonator and his trip to Portugal were funny and touching. I guess what I should do is stop reading his fake compendiums of knowledge, and wait until he publishes a fake autobiography instead.
• 
  Marc

  In this book of "fake trivia," "author" John Hodgman* claims that Bill Clinton was "the first black president." All fine and good EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that Hodgman earlier lists William Howard Taft as a black president as well. As far as I know, Taft came BEFORE Clinton. And logic dictates that they can't both be "first." So which is it, "Mr." Hodgman? WHICH IS IT?
  
  *FACT: "Hodg" is Mole-Man code for "mole." John Hodgman is merely the "nom de plume" (or "name of the plum") of none other than JOHN MOLEMAN. LOOK IT UP!
• 
  Kara

  I absolutely adored The Areas of My Expertise -- it was snortingly funny and I gave copies to all my friends for Christmas.
  
  While More Information is certainly amusing, it felt schticky and well, not that funny. Three-quarters of the way into it, I laughed out loud - for the first time. My boyfriend sitting next to me looked over and said, "FINALLY."
  
  I still adore Hodgman, but this book... eh.
• 
  Mark Rayner

  I feel a little guilty adding this to goodreads because I "read" the audiobook version of this, and listened to it over the course of a couple of weeks while walking the dog.
  
  Now most people in the neighbourhood are sure I'm nuts, because this often got me giggling insanely. (Before this, they were pretty sure I was nuts.)
  
  The only problem with this audiobook version? You can't get John Hodgman out of your head afterwards. Even if you bathe it in gin.
• 
  Agathafrye

  The continuation of "The Areas of My Expertise," in fact, the book even starts on page 237, one page after "Areas" ends. Mr. Hodgman is still obsessed with ferrets and their cons, mole men, and hobos. A sample quote: "My name is John Hodgman; you live on the planet Earth; and everything is going to be fine."
  
  Audiobook? CAN'T. WAIT.
• 
  Jeff

  Hysterical, though not quite as good as That Is All. The tripendium of complete world knowledge has a nice build taken together. As one might imagine a book of lists isnt always a real page turner but it is laugh out loud funny.
• 
  Eric Dexter Brown

  Second verse, just as great as the first!
• 
  Jane

  John Hodgman is my kind of weirdo. Although the audiobook was absurdly long, it also featured jaunty music and guest stars, and was equal parts ridiculous and enjoyable.
• 
  Jennifer

  I listened to the audio book, and I couldn't get through it. I found it... obnoxious? I don't know, just didn't like it.
• 
  Chris

  FACT: The Declaration of Independence was not the original creation of Thomas Jefferson, but was instead inspired by the work of Mole-Man declarationists.
  
  FACT: The true sport of kings, and the only one of which a professional gambler will avail himself, is that of hermit crab racing.
  
  FACT: Andrew Jackson was the first president to wear a necklace of human skulls at his inauguration.
  
  FACT: The first moon landing was achieved in 1802, when Napoleon Bonaparte stepped onto the lunar surface with his conquering army. The horse skeletons are remarkably well-preserved.
  
  WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?
  
  Well, now you are.
  
  In his first book, The Areas of my Expertise, John Hodgman claimed that he had provided us with "an almanac of complete world knowledge" that related matters historical, matters literary, matters cryptozoological, and of course, hobo matters, among many others. A read through this book, an almanac of interesting facts that were in no way, shape or form what is commonly known as "true," was a demonstration of why fiction is inherently better than reality in that it is usually far more interesting. By the time you finished reading the book, he suggested, you truly would know everything you needed to know, regardless of whether it actually happened to be true.
  
  So if the previous book was an almanac of complete world knowledge, why write another book? Surely complete world knowledge can't be added to? Well, Hodgman addresses that question right away. What it comes down to is very simply that, in the few short years since the publication of The Areas of my Expertise - new things have happened. I know it's hard to believe, and you may want to sit down and think about that for a moment.
  
  Not the least of these new things is that Hodgman has become a famous minor television personality, which has gained him all the fame, riches and power you might expect. Following the publication of that book, Hodgman became a regular on The Daily Show and, of course, starred in the now-famous Mac/PC ads as the fuddy-duddy PC who puts up with the douchebaggery of the Mac.
  
  Yeah, I really don't like the Mac guy. But maybe that's just because I really like Hodgman.
  
  He has come down from the luxury zeppelin he bought from Emo Philips in order to provide us with more world knowledge - this time touching on what he has discovered about the okapi, the secret history of the Mole-Men, and the secret cult that lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn - an exclusive neighborhood that can be accessed only upon having reached the status of famous minor television celebrity. It's a paradise, so long as you do not antagonize the children, who are allowed to kill you at their whim.
  
  As with the previous book, this is a good piece of entertainment. Its jokes loop back and forth on themselves, referencing passages not only elsewhere in the book, but also on the pages of its predecessor (and for the sake of convenience, the page numbering for this book picks up where that of the previous book left off.) Its facts (or "facts") are conveniently bolstered with handy charts and striking black and white photography that makes for a fascinating afternoon's reading.
  
  The intricate creativity that has been poured into building a bizarre alternate history of the United States is one that earns only the most sincere respect from me. Anyone with an imagination fertile enough to come up with things like Your Twelve Month Spleencast (a guide to telling the future using pig spleens (tip: it's going to be pretty awful)), a Teddy Roosevelt List that puts Chuck Norris' to shame, and a complete table of Brushes of Fame (with Hodgman as the famous person) deserves every cent I can give him.
  
  One of his great regrets, as he tells us in this book, is that The Areas of my Expertise was never made into a page-a-day desk calendar. Such a mark of true success has only been reached by such luminaries as Gary Larson and the Secret Cabal of Crossword Puzzle Writers who are battling the Jumblemancers for control of the United States. In order that his second book might escape such ignominy, Hodgman has provided an interesting fact for each day of the year on each page. So, if you tear out the pages after reading them, voila! You have a page-a-day calendar. And some of the bits are truly inspired. The listing for September 11th, for example, shows why that day of all days is truly unforgettable.
  
  But that is not all! Not yet, anyway. He is planning to continue his work into a third volume, due out whenever he manages to finish it. I assure you, Mr. Hodgman, I will be waiting eagerly for it.
  
  It's a strange type of humor, but then Hodgman is a strange type of guy. It's the sort of thing that only he could pull off, lying in such earnest detail that you wish it were true only because it sounds just so much fun.
• 
  Cameron DeHart

  I really liked the early books from the Daily Show gang, namely America: The Book, Earth: The Book, and Colbert's I am America (And So Can You). I haven't read Hodgman's first book, but based on my reaction to this one, I probably won't visit it. Either random fake trivia doesn't translate well in the audiobook format or I've outgrown the genre. Felt like I was wasting my time and attention while driving to this one.
• 
  Dale

  I'm really grooving on these books of fake trivia by John Hodgman, and it will be a dry three years or so waiting for the third and (hopefully not) final volume to be released. I enjoy this stuff so much that I scoured the book for extra material to read and found the taxonomic chart inside the dust cover, and read that, too. (TRUE FACT.) I was simultaneously delighted and horrified to realize that (a) Hodgman dropped a bunch of hardcore geek-speak, unexplained, into said chart, and (b) I didn't need it to be explained because I had passing (at least)familiarity with all of it. Lost civilizations of Mu and Dinotopia? Star Trek, Star Wars ... AND Star Blazers? LARPs, RenFaires and SCAs? Kandor the Bottle City? Galactus and the Watcher? Urban legends involving anus-brushes? Sweet Mother McCrea, this is the most "written just for me" book since The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Truly, Hodgman has inspired me to devote my life to being a hacker, a slacker, and an almanacker.
  
  Incidentally, Hodgman took the idea of "sequel as continuation" to its logical extreme by starting the page numbering where The Areas of My Expertise left off. So the first page after the Table of Contents is 263. At first I thought this was simply cute, but it actually completely messed with my head. I can usually tell how fast I'm going through a book based on an average speed of reading 50 pages per one-way commuting trip. So after two days of bus and train, being on page 479 was disconcerting to say the least. You wouldn't think it would be that disconcerting, but it really, really was. I obsess a bit over metrics like that. Still, mind-messing aside, a fantastic read start to finish (or middle-to-middle, since That Is All will pick up where More Information Than You Require left off. Come on 2012!)
  
  (2012?!?!?! Uh-oh.)
  
  
• 
  Ryan

  John Hodgman is a funny, funny man. I liked this book, though it didn't quite approach the absurdist and hilarious shock value of his inaugural almanac of fake trivia, The Areas of My Expertise. (My favorite bit from that first book comes from a list of failed palindromes: "Slow speed, deep owls.")
  While there are faux factual lists, tables, and footnotes aplenty here, there are also some anecdotes from Hodgman's life, which, while obviously exaggerated (running down the street after Justin Timberlake, meeting Emo Philips and buying a zeppelin from him), felt less like almanac material and more like personal essay in the vein of David Sedaris. I learned that several portions of More Information Than You Require first appeared elsewhere, which might explain why some of the chapters feel shoehorned in instead of flowing smoothly (or as smoothly as could be expected in such a non-sequiturious book.)
  Favorite bits from this book include dealing with household pests like pipe-dwelling axolotls (whose "external frill-like gills will make your water taste uncanny"), a list of 700 mole-man names and occupations ("Mr. Harry Boulderchoke, a speculator in semiprecious and absolutely unprecious stones), and facts about presidents (Taft would keep "a bowl of live frogs by his resting slab in the Oval Office that he would snack on during meetings.")
  One odd note: This book is supposed to literally pick up where the old book left off, page numbering and all, though that joke is compounded by this volume starting in the middle (page 327 or so), working its way to page 596, dawdling on for a few blank pages, and then kicking in with the colophon, title page, table of contents, and chapters from the early 230s. It's very disorienting.
• 
  Chris

  Funny. Not as funny as the first book in this... series. BUT FUNNY NONETHELESS.
  
  I remember reading Areas of My Expertise and constantly being struck by the astounding absurdity of Hodgman's deadpan. (To be more literal, I laughed so hard my ribs hurt and I may have slipped out of my chair once or twice. That could have been the ether, though.) This volume is no less deadpan (deadpanny?), with some really funny material about forks and computers and corn, but unfortunately, it's often redundant with things Hodgman had written about in the previous book. 700 hobo names were funny. 700 mole-man names, well, just seemed like a list of 700 names just for the sake of making a list of 700 strange, nonsensical names. Certainly that's part of the game that Hodgman's playing with almanacs and trivia books, but it just doesn't come off as well the second time around.
  
  The "page a day" calendar feature... To be honest, I'm still a little on the fence. A lot of those entries were quite funny--often some of the best material of the book; still, they were wholly distracting from the text proper, and--in all their bacchic glee--tended to shatter the reading experience. An interesting feature, but problematic.
  
  Overall? I'm looking forward to the final volume (potentially titled "That Is All"), but hope that Hodgman pulls a few new rabbits out of his pockets. Just leave the mole-men back at Monticello. This one started well, but trailed off towards the end. AND PERHAPS FEWER SECTIONS IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? IT IS AMUSING USED OCCASIONALLY FOR EFFECT, BUT OVERDONE JUST BECOMES HAPLESS YELLING.
• 
  John

  Honestly, I should have seen it coming from the title of the book: "More Information Than You Require" is another way of saying "Too Much Information". And so it is that this book is an indiscernible amalgam of made-up humorous trivia and a very personal memoir about fame and adulthood. That's a really strange choice (how much of the personal stuff made up?), but it's a choice that could have worked to break things up to allow either from getting tiresome. Unfortunately, I found both of the sections off-putting. The trivia takes its much of its humor from taking facts that are quite grotesque, at times gruesome, and then making them even more grotesque. The memoir sections are unrelatable, perhaps even unseemly, musings on fame. By the time you run across some really tender pieces on his wife and family, you're really too off-balance to enjoy them.
  
  There are some really great jokes in here. The format of having each page containing a section that also served as a "fact-a-day calendar" is inspired. I think that feature was ultimately kept me reading through the very long and involved sections of the main text. I think you could have a lot of fun just reading those entries. One thing to watch out for is that there are some running jokes that, if you're not paying attention (and why should you be, for a work of humor), you'll only catch on to once quite a bit of it is played out.
  
  Overall, I can recognize while this book isn't for me, its format and genre seem to be a novel reading experience and it will amuse and delight more sympathetic readers.