Almanack Report

The new year is off to a good start, with one book already finished. That's one book up on last year's zero books finished at this time. I was concurrently reading a second book, and have started a third... but let's take a look at that first one, shall we:

Book: The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman (click link for blog)
Purchased: December 28, 2006
Cost: $17.95
Pages: 256
Start reading date: January 3, 2007
Finished reading: January 20, 2007
Total days taken to read the book: 17
Average reading speed: 14 pg/day

You know John Hodgman, even if you think you don't. If you watched the Daily Show with any regularity over the past year you've seen him... and if you don't watch the Daily Show, well, he's the guy who plays the PC in those Mac vs. PC commercials. Anyway, he wrote a book of trivia... make that completely useless trivia since it's all made up and mostly factually incorrect (he does manage to spell a lot of things correctly, but "Ottowa" and "Almanack" aren't among them). It's intended as a parody of Farmer's Almanacs in a sense, complete with lunar charts for the lycanthropes among us. It's hilarious reading, and Hodgman's obsession with Hobo culture permeates throughout. Though capable of being read in random chunks (like a bathroom reader) if read in order, one gets a sense of a bizarre alternate reality, as Hodgman self references and annotates himself many times over.

Currently on the reading block are "Timeless Toys", which is a very large hardcover which scans the history of toys through the previous Century and relates the tales of the most enduring and popular of them, including Tinkertoys, Monopoly, Nerf, Lego, and GI Joe. Also, just started last night Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time", which seems to be a fairly quick read which is good... for me....