One More: Thing Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak is a lot of stories (60+) of varying lengths and quality for which I was probably not the perfect audience. I 'd think Millennials (or at least those who thought that Novak and Mindy Kaling were hip and relevant on The Office -- instead of narcissistic minor characters) would probably relate better than I did to stories about the pitfalls of modern dating or better understand the compulsion to post pictures of every meal one eats online. But while this wasn't a perfect win for me, there was much I did enjoy in this collection.
I listened to the audiobook, and that was a double-edged sword: Novak himself is an entertaining narrator and, with the help of some of his friends (Kaling, Rainn Wilson, Katy Perry, et al), some of these stories were more like mini radio plays, and that's probably where Novak's strengths lie (as he was not just an actor on The Office, but a writer/director/executive producer). The stories are very visual -- with many specific details about characters' appearance, clothes and expressions -- and the actors doing the reading bring the dialogue to life (in the story "The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women", Novak is narrating and says something like, "It wasn't what he said but the way he said it that stuck with us", and Rainn Wilson is chuckling meaningfully over Novak, and that made me smile, and that would have been lost if I had been reading a hard copy). On the other hand, with 63 stories told in only 7 hours, some stories ran to many pages, some to just a page or two, and some were like the following:
"Marie's Stupid Boyfriend"
No one didn't play the guitar "on principle". Either you can play the guitar, or you can't.
You don't "don't".
Remember him?
Or:
"The Literalist's Love Poem"And as an aside: that second short story (?) was the only part read by Emma Thompson and I was more intrigued by imagining the process by which she was asked to contribute -- and wondering how much of a hassle it was for her to record three mere lines -- than I was interested in the poem (?) itself. And that was the problem with the audiobook: every time a new story began, I had no idea how long it would last, and where there were several short short stories in a row, I found the experience to be incredibly jarring.
Roses are rose.
Violets are violet.
I love you.
There were stories that I particularly enjoyed like: "Julie and the Warlord" (about a first date between a couple who met on a match.com-type site, and in between flirting and agreeing on the pointlessness of flourless chocolate cake, Julie discovers that her date is an actual African warlord); "No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg" (an interesting vision of the afterlife); "Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Bicycle" (which I found to be a whip-smart -- if too brief -- commentary on what society has lost by crowd-sourcing knowledge); "The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela" (which not only perfectly captured the voices of people like Sarah Silverman and Jeffrey Ross but turned out to have something profound to say as well); and "Kellogg's (or: The Last Wholesome Fantasy of the Middle School Boy)", which I liked for a lot of reasons, but not least of all for this:
The Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of Kellogg's looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace. It looks exactly as you would hope it would look.And since the narrator then encourages the reader to look it up, here's the Kellogg's headquarters (pretty much as described):
On the negative side, there were too many celebrity-centered stories -- that may be of more interest to Millennials as well? -- and while I was intrigued by imaginary peeks into the home life of John Grisham and Confucius, the stories about Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Tony Robbins, Elvis Presley, and Chris Hansen seemed to have nothing universal to say and were about celebrities for the sake of being about celebrities. There was probably something I was missing about the point of so many stories being about lotteries (or bingo). And some stories might have seemed profound to Novak but were boring and pointless to me (like "If I Had a Nickel" -- that lays out in detail how to make an industry out of collecting a nickel every time you spill a cup of coffee -- or "The Market Was Down" -- that anthropomorphises the stock market and explains what "brings it down").
Novak starts each story with a fairly intriguing idea, and if I had one major complaint, it's that nothing was ever fully developed; these are not so much short stories as sketches. I understand that Novak was paid a seven figure advance for two books, and I'm actually hoping his next effort will be a novel -- he is an interesting writer line-by-line and I would love to see him use the longer form. There were some five star stories here and some two star stories, and with the uneven listening experience colouring my judgement, I need to settle on a three star overall rating.
