The Book of the Year by James Harking
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was highly anticpated by myself. I highly enjoy the weekly podcast so naturally I would be inclined to read this book. Thankfully, due to the constant shilling/self promotion on the podcast, it felt like a must have. This is the first QI book I have read and actually enjoyed. Probably because the material in it is largely original. There is some overlap between the podcast and the contents, but given that they both sometimes have facts from 2017, it’s not the authors’ fault.

Sometimes I did find it slightly boring but other times it was highly entertaining, the tragic life of a compilation book. The part about a man mistaking a cat’s anus for a wound was espeically funny.
They could have improved this book with a references section. Sometimes I find it quite hard to find more inofrmation of some of the facts, even with the power of the internet. I felt like certain sections could have done with being longer.

I also found the “For x, See y….” sections almost always verbose and not needed. With the exception of the section on Donald Trump, I didn’t find them funny at all and tended to skip them (the back handed barbs at POTUS were much appreciated though). Having listened to the first chapter of the audiobook, I would probably have liked listening to that rather than reading the actual book, because you have the chemistry of the QI elves.

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