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| The QI Annual 2008 | 
 enlarge | Author: John Lloyd
Creator: Stephen Fry
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
Buy New: £3.78
You Save: £9.21 (71%)
Buy New/Used from £0.88
Avg. Customer Rating:  (11 reviews)
Sales Rank: 991
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 2008
Pages: 96
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 11.4 x 7.8 x 0.5
ISBN: 0571237797
EAN: 9780571237791
ASIN: 0571237797
Publication Date: November 1, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 QI - Quite Interesting and quite informative, really! October 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As an Australian fan of QI, but still catching up on the publications, I'm a recent reader of a few QI books. The QI Annual brought back meories of the annuals of my childhood, but without the daft makeup tips and silly advice on boys! The QI Annual doesn't aim to be a deadly serious tome full of staid facts and figures, the QI team have done a fabulous job in making the books informative yet fun. I've read the Annual several times, yet I always manage to find something interesting I didn't see earlier. Great for trivia buffs and myth exploders, or anyone who has a fascination for interesting tidbits. A great companion to the show, and a must for all QI Fans.
I already have the QI Annual 2009 on pre-order!
Amazing January 22, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you like the series, then you will love the book. It is split in very small pieces of information, which makes it ideal for commuting. I recommend it!
 Barely interesting and doesn't transfer January 13, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
I love the TV show QI. I'm a fan of most of the guests, have seen several in live gigs or else read a number of their various books, I've got the first series box set, the first DVD game and the Book of General Ignorance. Like I say, I'm a fan.
I'm also a fan of the TV comedy spin-off book - the Goodies books, the Young Ones, Morcambe and Wise, the New Statesman for example - were all grab bags of daft snippets, spoof documents, and other original material. This is genre of book which seemed to have gone out of favour for a while but has come back well lately with Al Murray's Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense and Borat's Touristic Guidings.
The QI Annual is along similar lines. It is stylishly presented - having a nice Beano annual look - and the contents are a more or less original miscellany of sideways-looking snippets, interesting facts and articles.
There are, to my mind, two vital ingredients to the concept and the appeal of QI: one is the spontaneous interplay between the guests and the other is the overturning of received wisdom. The currency of the show - its interesting facts - are usually all the more interesting because they are so little-known and bizarre or because they refute commonly held 'knowledge'. Both of these key ingredients are totally absent from the book.
The guest interplay is of course impossible to reflect in an annual but that needn't have undermined the QI Annual necessarily if the trivia was interesting and humorously communicated, but it's not. It's decidely dull and mundane. Jeremy Clarkson contributes a heavily padded out section, the basic gist of which is that people around the world eat stuff like dogs, guinea pigs and insects - hardly news to anyone. Clive Anderson delivers an essay on the English Elm...that's it...no angle, no punchline...just a dry couple of pages about an inappropriately named species of tree.
There are brief moments of edutainment (the spoof, Boys Own style cartoon adventures of Stephen Fry for example) but essentially this is a very shallow, sketchy sub-Schott book of unfunny, widely known trivia. If the book was not associated with the TV series, and the same content was compiled and attributed to some nobody researcher, then I doubt it would get published.
 A very nice Annual for the series January 8, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
A very nice read with plenty of toilet humour and interesting facts to impress your friends. To be honest some of he features of members from the show seem to lack any actual input from them at all as they cover random subjects like the Elm tree and What animals you wouldnt normally eat but still a very nice giggle at the end of the day and any fan of the show should own it
Really funny December 18, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I bought this for someone else for Xmas but I've managed to read just about all of it myself. Its really very funny and would appeal to almost anyone. It's an ideal gift, but one you might think about keeping for yourself.
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