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That Is All (2011)

by John Hodgman(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0525952446 (ISBN13: 9780525952442)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Dutton Adult

series

Complete World Knowledge

review 1: I had read the first two books in this series and although I knew the series was losing steam I wanted to eventually read it. What can I say? This is in the same format as the other two books and carries on the page numbering as if it were one big tome and has the footnotes and the date by date little info facts on the top. Let’s start with the info facts on the top. This was “The End” and the theme of the book was the apocalypse that would occur on December 21 2012 (according the end of the Mayan calendar). First of all, reading this in 2014 makes the joke less funny than if I read it in 2011 when it came out. If you read it then you can laugh at the “prediction” and now the joke falls flatter because it refers to something we know didn’t happen. Yes, obvi... moreously the “prediction” was a joke anyway but it does seem dated now – literally. Because of that theme, the jokes aren’t as funny as some of the others in the previous books (please see “running out of steam”) and feel more like him trying to do some humour of apocalypse scenarios. Most of them weren’t that funny and I think he could have tried harder to do humorous “world ends” than the ones he did which felt like they were out of a lame Sci fi novel instead. He didn’t go far enough with the lameness to get a laugh that way. The content itself – I think the opening chapters were good and had some solid laughs in them but the last couple of sections, specifically the last one, was painfully unfunny and uninteresting. I don’t even know what he was trying for with the last section “The Beginning”. Just bad, unfunny, uninteresting and it made no sense. Maybe it is an in joke that only Hodgman gets. Overall, I feel John was pushing it to try and wring another novel out of this premise of presenting us with facts he made up. And he would have been better served if he had worked in more of his fake stories of his life based on true (I assume) events that happened to him. I did enjoy the first half of the book - but those last few sections and the “This date in history” headers were Dreck.
review 2: It took me almost a year to get through this- reading a little bit at a time because it was so darn weird I couldn't digest more than a few pages at a time. There were some passages that made me laugh out loud they were so funny, and some that were, well, just weird.If you like John Hodgman's sense of humor, you will enjoy this book, but expect it to be a long-term time investment.Also, on December 19, 2012- the ice gods and fire demons battle it out- "just as the Actuaries predicted". That phrase made the whole book worth it for me. less

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