Started this the other week, and figured I'd throw up some quick thoughts before I start with A to Z tomorrow.
I've always enjoyed these kinds of in universe guidebooks. I don't know how many times I read over the Essential Guide series as a kid, looking forward to covering those when I get to them in Star Wars Classics.
The "fantasy tour" pastiche works well here, giving just enough distance to mock, without just coming across annoyingly snarky. Sometimes, I think books like this lean too far in the "making fun of" direction. There's plenty of teasing here, but it's clear the author (who also wrote the original Howl's Moving Castle) is enjoying it.
Most of the jokes are fairly well trod (possibly not when the original was published in 1996) but they're very well honed here. Not too long, not to short. The most creative is probably a running gag about the ecology of Fantasyland. Basically, there's not enough of anything to maintain a reasonable food chain, ecosystem, etc. so people speculate things like "horses reproduce by pollination." I'm not sure it entirely makes sense (if Fantasyland is a curated tour, why couldn't they just reproduce behind the scenes?) but it's good to have something that hasn't been circulated since the Usenet days to keep the book interesting.
It's interesting to see some of the insistences that feel pretty dated now, but presumably weren't 30 years ago. The book is adamant that STEW is the only (or at least dramatically most common) form of meat, in Fantasyland. I think (thanks GRRM?) food-porn-fantasy has taken off enough now that that's pretty well debunked.
Besides being a reasonably entertaining book itself, this is a great example of how books can tie to particular memories for us. I've probably had this book for almost 15 years. I ordered it from the indie bookshop I worked at in college, after Nethack cribbed some quotes for flavor text. The woman who owned the store, who is probably the only reason I stayed sane in undergrad, mailed it on from the store to my parents' house over winter break as a gift. Even if it sucked, I'd still value it for that, but it helps that it's pretty funny too.
A couple choice bits:
"This is indeed a likely claim in the case of threesomes or pantheons: Fantasyland does have the air of having been made by a committee."
"JOKES are against the Rules, except for very bad cumbersome jokes cracked by [...] (It is believed that the management in fact thinks that these are very good jokes, and treasures them.)
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