Before he appeared on The
Daily Show to promote his first book, The Areas Of My Expertise, John Hodgman was only a former professional
literary agent with an occasional McSweeney's column ("Ask A Former
Professional Literary Agent"). Thanks to the serendipitous harmony between
Hodgman's alternative universe, in which hobos await the signal to take over
American government, and The Daily Show's incredulity about our supposedly factual
universe, Hodgman was given a recurring slot as the show's Resident Expert, and
a role as the bumbling PC in a series of Apple computer ads. And thanks to
these achievements of tenuous, cable-level celebrity, Hodgman was able to
complete the second in his planned trilogy of invented-trivia books, More
Information Than You Require.
The new volume is in every
way a continuation of Areas, except in the ways it's clearly superior. For
example, the page numbering continues from the first installment, beginning
with the table of contents on page 237. Yet the book doubles as a not-so-handy
page-a-day calendar featuring fake-toids on the theme "Today In The Past,"
progressing from the title page ("October 21, 2008, New York City: This book is
officially published") to the image credits ("October 20, 1982, Virginia: Day
486 of the constant rain of dead frogs"). Each calendar page also features the
continuation of a loose narrative of a better world, in which moon-faced humor
editors get to make cameo appearances on Battlestar Galactica†(possibly as the final Cylon) and use their enormous wealth to
finance a feature-film version of the TV program The Adventures Of Brisco
County, Jr.†("Let's face it: It's
time.")
Hodgman's work delivers
the salted-peanuts effect of trivia collections without any of the danger of
accidental cultural literacy. His avuncular, quasi-Edwardian style acquires a
downmarket memoir-ish patina in More Information, meditating abashedly on
sudden semi-fame. But such asides detract little from useless disinformation
about the presidents (which ones had hooks for hands?), gambling ("Sure Thing
Number One: Roulette"), get-rich-slow schemes ("door-to-door sales of doors"),
and in a blatant bid to create another Internet meme, mole-men. ("The Mole-Men:
Are They The New Hoboes?") More Information Than You Require†is exactly the tonic for these truth-challenged times: a
transformation of pedestrian reality through the enlightened power of
imagination and insatiable list-making.