Vacationland by John Hodgman

I have to start off this time by talking about book packaging. The point of a book's outsides - title, cover art, any descriptions or quotes - are to attract readers and tell them what kind of book it is. For some writers, particularly those who write the same thing in vast quantities, just putting that author's name large and using a standard look is enough - make sure the title is in the right vein, some glowing quotes and copy that says what the deal is this time, and you're done.

Most writers aren't at that level. For most writers - and I want to emphasize that this includes many, many writers who have already been bestsellers once or repeatedly - the packaging needs to work harder than that. Any writer who changes focus, or has more than one mode can be in particular peril of being stuck into the wrong bucket by random readers. For a very banal example: Isaac Asimov wrote hundreds of books. His publishers made it very clear when he had a new SF novel; those looked nothing like the many non-fiction books he also wrote.

John Hodgman wrote a weirdzoid trilogy to begin his literary career - three books full of fake facts, bizarre stories, and endless footnotes. They were like nothing else anyone did, and they had complex, wordy covers that presented their wacky nature well. They were bestsellers.

A few years later, Hodgman had a fourth book, in a different mode. So it had a different look - so far so good.

But let me ask a question. Take that cover above. You see the title and subtitle: Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches. The back cover has a long laudatory quote about what a great writer Hodgman is from Michael Chabon. The inside has three pages of quotes, all about how funny it is. At no point is there any other indication of what Hodgman is writing about.

Do you think this book is:

A. Another big complex collection of fake facts

B. A touching memoir of Hodgman's mother's death and how that changed his life

C. A collection of stories of Hodgman going to various odd places and probably not enjoying himself there

Pencils down. Which would you choose?

I thought it was C. I vaguely avoided this book for seven years because I thought it was another "I can't enjoy myself on vacation" book by a rich white guy. (It sort-of is, actually, but in a very different way.)

It's actually B, though I'm cheating a bit. If I were marketing this book, I'd call it something like "a memoir of family history, growing older, and summers spent in rural Massachusetts and coastal Maine."

The thing you absolutely need to know, and the marketers behind this book scandalously forgot to mention, is that "Vacationland" is the slogan on Maine's license plates. Hodgman means it ironically - we all figured it was ironic somehow, but the specifics of the irony are important.

Vacationland has a very handsome package that completely fails to explain what the book is or why someone would want to read it, other than "Hey, you know John Hodgman, right?" or "lots of people say this is really funny!" Those are two half-decent reasons, admittedly - but the family history bit is more central, and more resonant for more readers.

It physically pains me to see book-marketing bobbled like this, which is why I'm wasting all this time on the packaging.

Oh, sure, the book is funny and thoughtful - it's apparently the distilled version of a series of stand-up shows Hodgman did in the mid-Teens, which may explain the structure (lots of relatively short essays; two big sections about basically the summer house in Massachusetts and the summer house in Maine, plus interstitial material). That much is true. But unless you're the kind of reader who completely buys celebrity blurbs - and I would argue a John Hodgman reader is the opposite kind of reader to that - you will want more details to believe that.

Vacationland is inherently about being John Hodgman - he's always been his own best material, and he knows that. This is what he wrote when he ran out of fake facts and needed to dig into his own life for material. The title is not inappropriate, but it's about living in places, not just visiting them, and the connections Hodgman and his family have to specific places - the parts of Massachusetts where he spent his summers as a kid, the coast of Maine where his now-wife did the same.

And it really is as funny as the blurbs say. I don't know if you'll believe me any more than you believe George R.R. Martin or Neil Gaiman or Sarah Vowell or Jon Stewart (all of whom are quoted in the book), but I guess we all agree, which is nice.

But more importantly, it's not just funny, which a lot of the quotes try to get into. It's funny about real things, in an honest way. Oh, Hodgman will always have that wild-hair goofy streak - the fake-facts mines are always at his back - but this time, he's in a clearer emotional register and telling the truth as best he can. It's a shame his editor and book designer didn't actually try to say that.