How To

I liked this!! It actually helped me learn a little about science while being entertaining and not feeling like a textbook

I'm not a diehard XKCD reader or anything, but it's a clever and fun comic strip so I was hoping for the same here. And that's kind of what this is, but it didn't really work for me for some reason. There are some fun bits, but a lot of it is just a bit too drawn out or one note for me.

I might have done myself a disservice listening to this via audiobook though, I believe the printed version includes a lot of comics and other illustrations.

I actually preferred this one a lot to the 1st

Just excellent, albeit realistically absurd.

This is a fun exploration of engineering principles for when you never really need them.
Well, I dunno, I do need to cross rivers sometimes. Maybe I could use this advice.
The pictures are fantastic.

You will probably laugh out loud and have trouble explaining what is so funny.

Weird, absurd, entertaining nonetheless.
Randall Munroe first grabbed my attention with his book What if. It had the similar humor as this one, where he explores some very extreme answers to very valid questions.
At times the answers do get ridiculous and make you chuckle.
Reading this book made me think of the similarities between it and Andrew Stanek's How to Kill Hitler: A Guide For Time Travelers. Another instant classic, a well researched one too.

I've been an xkcd fan for ages now, and this is my favorite extension of that universe. Munroe is really good at explaining complicated science with hilarious stick figures. The concepts in this book are silly and extended beyond all logic, which manages to prove some really interesting points. It's funny, easy to read, and enlightening. Recommended for science nerds and xkcd fans everywhere.

I got this book for Matt for Christmas. He loved it, and laughed out loud a lot, and read passages to me, and told me I needed to read it when he was done. So I did. I'm such a good wife. :)

I don't think I appreciated it nearly as much as he did, but I'm not a physics-head, and you really have to be in the right headspace for this book because a lot of it is, to use the phrase from the cover, absurd. That said, I also laughed out loud way more than I thought I would.

Favorite chapters:
• How to Play the Piano - something about extending a keyboard to include notes that are only discernible if you're playing music for bats and elephants really appealed to me?
• How to Move - because the comics were funny and I've been on highways next to houses that are being moved in their Oversized Load trucks, and seeing other (absurd) ways of moving a house was funny (as was the idea of just putting all your boxes on the ground and using a truck to push them to the new location).
• How to Play Football - yeah I don't even care about football or Lord of the Rings, but if the whole point of the chapter is how to score a touchdown and then throw the football into Mordor ... I'm on board.
• How to Play Tag - because Munroe pitted the two fastest runners in the world for distance and sprints against each other and then determined how they would or would not win at tag. The only things is, he forgot about the No Tagbacks rule.
• How to Win an Election - because dear God at least something election-related is funny and doesn't involve You-Know-Who.

Too many hard-to-read footnotes

You know how boring scientific manuals are? Not this book. Randall Munroe takes on problems—how to walk a dog, how to win an election, how to dig a hole, and oodles more—and offers solutions that are convoluted, complex, unnecessary, odd, and exceedingly funny.

I loved What If and now I'm a fan of How To. I guess I need to find a copy of Thing Explainer. I'll have to write a letter to the author, earn money to pay for the book, drive to the author's home....