More Information Than You Require

Information or pre-information required to write a review of More Information Than You Require, by John Hodgman (Dutton), author of The Areas of My Expertise (reviewed in Geist 61), would normally include the location of the book itself, a copy of which surfaced in the office and then quickly disappeared, taking with it the information required, and leaving me only a few memories of a  pleasing turn through its pages: a recurrence, for example, of the question (raised also in The Areas of My Expertise) of U.S. presidents who had hooks for hands; a list of names of seven hundred mole men; several omens and portents; instructions for telling the future from a pig’s spleen, etc. At the least I can say that More Information Than You Require contains the information that I require to write this review, and of course more information than that, so for this reader at least the promise made in the title is fulfilled. Like the earlier book, More Information Than You Require is (to quote information taken from the review of the earlier book in Geist 61) a goofy and brilliant book descended from a list (not included in either volume) of equally goofy and brilliant works that include Don Quixote in the seventeenth century, Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth and, in the twentieth century, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts by Donald Barthelme, and Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec.