Weird Shit

Funny!! Anything that can be educational and funny at the same time is a win in my opinion. I read some of these out loud and my kids actually stopped and listened. Great gift material and great party material also. Loved it!

Received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A Bit Uneven, But Fun

It seems to me that there are two basic tests for an odd-and-unusual facts bathroom book. Are the facts odd, unusual and interesting? Does the author stay out of his own way?

On that second question I'm happy to report that apart from a perfectly amiable introduction, the author does in fact stay out of his own way. We don't have to hear about how he found each fact, or where he was at the time, or what he feels now about his former girlfriend. And there isn't any boffo rah-rah selling of the material between bits.

The book is broken up into a bunch of chapters by subject matter, and the facts appear in individual paragraphs. The book is organized like, and works like, a standard, if vaguely demented, anthology, (like, say, "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations"), and is eminently skimmable. As to content, we run the gamut from animals, diseases, foods, crimes, physical oddities, sexual peccadilloes, death, famous people, and artworks, to name a few of the categories. Each fact gets a bit of context, and a bit of engaging commentary, but it's not belabored or stupid/cutesy.

That said, some bits are more interesting than others, and we lean more to the freakish side, (anatomy, weird food, ways to die, sexual practices), than the surprising or informative side. Since the point is to just have a collection of weird stuff, well, mission accomplished.

(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Weird Shit by Mark Leigh is a strange and wonderful book with unusual and amazing facts you would never believe were true. It has chapters of weirdness from animals, military, sports, art, leaders, sex, food, anatomy, entertainers, the rich, crime, and the law. Those are just a few of the many oddities here. Some are funny, others gross, a few are unbelievable, and others are sad because they are true. A very entertaining book that would be great by yourself, at a party, a bathroom book for that bathroom person in everyone's house, for a gift, or for the living room side table for a conversation piece. I learned a lot out of it, some I really didn't want to know, but it is in there now! I received this book from NetGalley for a honest review and it in no way effects my rating or the content of this review.

Endless supply, well curated

Mark Leigh has a franchise to collect, refine and redistribute odd facts, silly events, and utter stupidity. These small books are collections of bullet points, no more than a paragraph long, usually worth a chuckle or an eyeroll. Some of it is even useful!

These are some of my faves:
-Chico California imposes a $500 fine for anyone detonating a nuclear weapon in town.
-The official greeting in Kingsville Texas is Heaveno.
-Tigers only attack from the rear, so wearing a face mask on the back of your head keeps the tigers away.
-An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
-Men of the Australian Walibri tribe shake each other’s penises instead of hands.
-A French soldier invented Greco-Roman wrestling. There was no such thing before.
-Venereal disease killed eleven times as many soldiers as the Japanese did in the Burma campaign of WWII.
-The B2 bomber needs 24 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight.
-The actual word for is # is octothorpe.

It’s an easy read, decently balanced – not too much of any one topic.

David Wineberg

Review will be posted Feb 19 Weird Sh!t is a book full of really weird facts on all sorts of topics. This is a quick read and you'll be full of quirky facts that you will want to throw into conversation as often as you can. I know that I mentioned 3 of the facts in the first evening after finishing the book that afternoon. There are all sorts of topics and I'm sure more than a few will have you laughing or confused or just plain weirded out. The book is called Weird Shit after all.

It's kind of hard to review this book since it is basically just a bunch of facts, but if you are into useless and weird trivia or are just bored and want a quick read, be sure to check this one out.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.

Great for fans of series such as uncle john's bathroom reader. Really weird fun short bits. Some are more like a little story, while others may just be a simple one sentence fact. There're a variety of different categories, adding to the interest of this book. Some were so amazing I needed to look up more information on it. In a sense it is educational but not quite like a text book or manual. Great for reading when you just have a short time, or perhaps you want to get your mind off of things bothering you. Could make a good gift for people with a certain sense of humor.

Weird Shit was an interesting book full of pretty cool facts that were fun to read when I didn't have time to crack open an actual book to read. It has quite a few categories with all kinds of facts in them - from human oddities to animal stories to stories of the weird things people were arrested for. It was definitely a nice read for those who need a quick read!