James Harkin - The Book of the Year 2018: Your Definitive Guide to the World’s Weirdest News

My favourite geeks. Hilarious. Sideways. Brilliant. Tim Minchin

In a year dominated by Russian collusion and Brexit confusion, The Book of the Year returns with another dose of barely believable yet wholly unimpeachable facts and stories from the past twelve months.

Every week for the past four years, Dan, James, Anna and Andy the creators of the award-winning, chart-topping comedy podcast No Such Thing As A Fish have wowed each other and millions of their listeners with the most astonishing trivia they have learned over the previous seven days. Now, once again, they have put down the microphones, picked up their pencils, and transformed a years worth of weird and wonderful happenings into one uplifting book that you wont be able to put down.

Discover how Peruvian mummies affected the World Cup, and why Love Island contestants are experts in game theory as well as hundreds of stories that may have passed you by entirely, including the news that:

• NASA sent a man with a fear of heights to the International Space Station.
• An ice hotel in Canada caught fire.
• Mark Zuckerbergs private data was compromised while he was talking to Congress about compromised data.

From Kim Jong Uns personal potty to Jeremy Corbyns valuable vegetables, The Book of the Year 2018 is an eye-opening tour of yet another incredible year you didnt know youd lived through.

No Such Thing As A Fish is a team of researchers who work on the BBC TV show QI. Each week they gather together in their Covent Garden office and record a podcast discussing the most interesting facts theyve discovered over the previous seven days. In the three years since it launched, the show has attracted 1.4 million weekly listeners, won multiple awards, been transformed into the spin-off topical BBC2 TV series No Such Thing As The News, performed a sell-out UK tour, and been named one of iTunes top 10 most downloaded podcasts of 2016.

The team is made up of James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski and Dan Schreiber.

James is the head writer on QI, with ten series and five bestselling books under his belt. He has also appeared on TV quiz shows Fifteen to One and Only Connect, reaching the semi-finals in the latter and embarrassingly crashing out of the former.

Andrew is a writer and comedian who also contributes to Private Eye magazine, is a member of the improv troupe Austentatious, and has staged his own one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe. He is known to fans (his mum) as Lightning.

Anna is a QI scriptwriter who has previously worked in Scottish politics and Australian advertising, as well as selling fruit wine and hay-baling in the Highlands. She refuses to join Twitter. #GetAnnaOnTwitter

Dan loves yetis.

Laced with their dry wit, and likely to end up in many a pub-quizzers Christmas stocking.

Daily Telegraph

QI is such an institution that even the programmes researchers are taking over the world. Fully justified that is, too, as anyone whos heard their podcast, No Such Thing As A Fish, will confirm. Its packed with killer facts and so is this book.

Daily Mail

If you love funny facts as much as we love funny facts then you should get your funny fact-loving faces in front of The Book of the Year.

Comedy Central UK

Hugely enjoyable Its tone is just right: deadpan, sharp and disarmingly offbeat.

Mail on Sunday

Bitesize chunks of truth in a year of fake news. If you love fact-based trivia, youll get a kick out of this.

Irish Times

Welcome back to your annual anthology of the worlds weirdest news.

In 2017, when we wrote the first Book of the Year, we thought nothing could match the unrelenting absurdity of that years news. How wrong we were. Since then, not only have the main issues like Brexit and Trump got bigger and madder by the day, thousands of new brilliant, bizarre stories have come to light.

Weve spent the last twelve months gathering up the lesser-known facts behind the years headlines. For instance, we discovered which dictator travels with a personal potty (see ).

As well as finding the best bits from the main events, we mined the news for the curious and quirky stories that never made it to the front pages. Like the fact that a woman called Crystal Methvin was arrested for possessing crystal meth (see ).

Of course, we wouldnt have learned any of this if it werent for the worlds journalists and fact-finders who dug out the news in the first place. We dedicate this book to all of them, from the investigators who broke the vital news of a government which censored its own policies (see ).

Reading the news every day, its easy to think the world is a gloomy and frightening place. This book intends to show that its full of bright, eccentric, uplifting spots too. We hope the stories that follow inspire you to do something great or if not great, at least something so unbelievably daft that youre guaranteed a place in next years book (see ).

So, here we go again in a year dominated by Kim Jong Un, #MeToo, and Three Lions, we four fact-hunters present to you The Book of the Year 2018, your guide to what on earth just happened.

Dan, James, Anna & Andy

Covent Garden, London, 2018

In which we learn
Why flies cant fly with American Airlines, whose reputation might be tarnished by working with the White House, who bought Russell Crowes jockstrap, how to tell your astronauts from your astron-nots, and why the Belgian army are such mummys boys.

American Airlines banned passengers from travelling with emotional support insects.

American Airlines changed its rules on emotional support animals (companion animals prescribed to people with disabilities). Emotional support insects are now prohibited, along with emotional support animals with hooves (apart from emotional support miniature horses, which are allowed). Other banned animals include emotional support amphibians, emotional support ferrets and emotional support hedgehogs. The move was a response to an 84 per cent rise in urine-, faeces- and aggression-related incidents involving animals since 2016.

A man who bought the original Alcoholics Anonymous document waived his anonymity to help alcoholics.

The founding book of Alcoholics Anonymous, dating to 1935, was sold this year for $2.4 million at an auction in Los Angeles. The text, which is known to its members as the big book due to the thickness of its paper, was bought by the owner of the Indianapolis Colts NFL team, who has been battling his own addictions over the last few years. Jim Irsay decided to go public over the sale, saying that he plans to make a cabinet for the book, and display it for part of the year at Alcoholics Anonymouss headquarters in New York in order to help inspire alcoholics to give up drink.