To be honest with you, this review will most likely not be worth a hill of beans. This is a saying my mother uses and I’m just thinking right now that I have no idea what it actually means, or why she says it. Beans have a lot of nutritional value and can be quite tasty. Or does it mean that the beans are worth a lot and whatever you’re comparing this fictional hill to is worth less? This also makes no sense because why would you want a hill of beans when you could have, for instance, a hill of gold? Or platinum? Or like, anything else?
Anyway, the reason this review will be pointless for most readers, at least those that want to know about the book and its quality and my opinion of it, is that due to the circumstances during which I listened to the book, I don’t have much at all to say, and pretty much no memory of most things that went on in it. The reason for this is that I have OCD, and I foolishly tried to do another 1,000 piece puzzle, which I know I can’t do like your average neurotypical, because I. CANNOT. STOP. UNTIL. IT. IS. FINISHED. Even to eat, and food is my #1 motivator and favorite thing even over books. My friend Jessy suggested I set timers on my phone for mandatory food and yoga/stretching breaks, so maybe I will try that next time, but I get super weird about it, so we’ll see. ANYWAY, the point of this story is that I listened to 90% of this audiobook while doing this National Parks puzzle, for six hours straight, and I basically went into this weird trance and lost time, so the book and its contents are mostly stored away in my sub-conscious, or maybe I only put it in short-term storage instead of long-term. Who knows. The point is my memories of this book are hazy like a fever dream, instead of clear and sparkling like usual (coughsarcasmcough).
Here is what I remember:
*The book starts off with him investigating the appearance of some other book? I literally do not remember how this turned out.
*There was a commune for psychopaths where they were supposed to learn to control their urges, but once they left they were even worse than before.
*There was some guy who lied about being insane to try and get out of a charge for assault and he ended up stuck in a famous asylum in England for fifteen years, only it turns out he wasn’t stuck because of his lies but because he was clearly a psychopath.
*The psychopath test, of which I remember almost nothing, was invented by some guy???
I know there was more in the book than that because it is seven hours long. All I can tell you is that I seemed to enjoy listening to it while in my trance? Jon Ronson certainly has his own style.
Okay, so I looked up the etymology of the phrase “not worth a hill of beans,” and apparently it is a combination of TWO idoms: an older saying from the middle ages, “not worth a bean” (which makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE than the current phrase), which Americans in the mid-1800s apparently added on to their frequently used phrase “a hill of” (which they apparently tacked onto everything willy-nilly at the time) and “not worth a hill of beans” is the result that stuck. The more you know.