Pun Salad

Another "wish I had liked it better" from Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings. It's about various myths, fictions, beliefs, etc. about what happens to you after you kick the bucket. The gimmick is that it's sort-of patterned after those checklist travel books, most directly 1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz.

The travel-book gimmick is a mixed bag, mainly consisting of semi-humorous "tips" on what (or what not) to do or see during your visit: food, personalities, sights, etc. This gimmick doesn't seem to be consistently maintained throughout. Ken's brand of snarky humor pervades, and I didn't find it all that amusing on the printed page. I note that he narrates the audiobook, and, who knows, it might work better there.

It's broken up into seven broad sections, classifications of the afterlife's source:

Mythology: legends and speculations from the Inuit, the Chinese, Egyptians, Native Americans. … These ancient folks had very active imaginations. (Or, who knows, one of these might actually be true, which would probably be a big surprise to nearly everyone finding themselves there.)

Religion: How this is distinguished from "mythology" is anyone's guess. Maybe popularity? Anyway, here we have things like The Book of the Dead from Tibet, Catholicism's Limbo (now deprecated), Buddhism's Nirvana, … Given the fact that nobody really reports back from the afterlife, I was impressed by the very active imaginations involved in these diegeses. To the extent that I wondered what hallucinogens the originators were taking. Unsurprisingly, Ken mentions that The Book of the Dead was recommended by Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley as "a guide to LSD trips."

Books: Here we have more obviously fictive descriptions: C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Milton's Paradise Lost, Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven, … Since I read this over the Christmas season, I looked for Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but nope. And (a nice surprise for me) Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books. Never mind that I kind of lost interest around book four.

Movies: Some real obvious choices here: Field of Dreams. the Bill & Ted movies, The Sixth Sense, Coco. And (yes, it's that time of year) It's a Wonderful Life.

Television: More easy choices: The Simpsons, The Good Place. And one surprising one: My Mother the Car. Does anyone remember that show besides Ken and me?

Music and Theater: songs from Paul Simon, the Righteous Brothers, and the Talking Heads; Cats, Carousel, …

Miscellaneous: Speculations from the comics, DC and Marvel; and everything else that didn't fit in above.

Ken's treatment of these scenarios is mostly perfunctory, probably necessary if you're trying to fit 100 of them into 275 pages. (And there's a lot of whitespace.) All in all, this probably worked better as a book proposal.