Oh goodness! One of my favorite new things to talk about – this book… because I have a super love/hate relationship with it.
(I know you don’t come here for book reviews and this may not be interesting to you if you have no interest in knowing more about this book… But since I love to talk about it, I’m getting it all out here. And if you don’t want to talk about it, I hope to see you in a few days!)
Here’s some good stuff about it:
1) There’s a Calendar of Events in the back. So you can easily look for things going on in whatever time of year you’re in.
2) There’s also an index in the back. I didn’t notice that at first. It’s pretty helpful.
3) There are a lot of things in the book! (Obviously.) With 1,001, how will you not have a whole bunch? It’s hard to remember what I knew about and what I didn’t before I got this book, but I do know I learned new things. So, that’s always awesome.
Some maybe not so good stuff:
1) If you want to fully explore one area, you may have to bounce all around the book. or instance, Griffith Park is not mentioned in only one spot. There are different ideas for things to do within Griffith Park in at least 3 chapters – “The Classics,” “The Great Outdoors,” and “City of Cars.” I think it might be easier if you could see everything the book suggests for one place all in the same area of the book.
For instance, Griffith Park is not mentioned in only one spot. There are different ideas for things to do within Griffith Park in at least 3 chapters – “The Classics,” “The Great Outdoors,” and “City of Cars.”
It might be easier if all of Griffith Park (and other things) were in the same section, so I can just get the whole picture of what I might want to do.
2) It is next to impossible to do everything in the book! The book gives tons of options (which is great), but not everything will be for everyone.
But even if it all appeals to you – all the golf and bowling, and animal stuff and kid stuff. If your interests run the gamut, and you have unlimited money and time to do even the most expensive things and/or the classes that go on for months… there’s still an entry about an underground tunnel system that is no longer accessible to the public.
(It’s not that that’s changed since the book’s printing. The book itself lists at the end of the paragraph that the tunnel system is no longer open to the public… though it is open to government employees.)
So, I guess if you work for the government, you can complete the whole thing. Otherwise, not so much. (And what fun is it to give us a challenge we can’t complete? Are we really gonna get a government job to be able to check off one thing in this book?
3) There are redundancies in the 1,0001 things. For instance, #52 suggests going to a game at Dodger stadium. #161 suggests seeing a game at Dodger Stadium from the top tier. How about we put that as an idea within number 52?
Also, when Disneyland in mentioned, there are 12 separately numbered things. I feel like “Go to Disneyland” could probably be it’s own thing that could be expanded on with bullet points. Granted, there’s some stuff that I think could be separate. (Club 33 is a special thing that I wouldn’t associate with a normal Disneyland trip. So, okay.) And of course this is just opinion-based. Whether 12 things within Disneyland should be numbered separately could be argued either way.
I’ll pick up with some neutral things about the book tomorrow.