I’m not counting things I read, or, just as often, skim, while looking for musical projects. At least not yet. So no commentary on Jane Yolen’s Sherwood or Bruce Lansky’s Girls to the Rescue, Book 3.
But (5) Chris Moore’s You Suck: a Love Story was a complete and total hoot. Herself had to point out a moment I’d missed—a scene from Moore’s last book, A Dirty Job, told from a different character’s perspective. Delightful (not just admitting that two stories exist in the same ‘verse, but celebrating the fact).
Abby Normal’s “diary” entries are spectacular mixes of Valley Girl, self-consciously-used hip-hop, and hyperliterate vocabulary; the book would be worth the price of admission if it were nothing more than those. (In fact, every time an Abby entry ends and we return to the omniscient narrator, there’s a momentary letdown, but it’s only momentary.)
That it’s a shorter book than Dirty Job or Lamb might make it seem slight, but Moore never disappoints.
(6) Calvin Trillin’s About Alice really is a short book. It’s a little like the liner notes to a marriage; Trillin, by his own admission, has written about his wife very often. This slim volume, written after her death, does nothing so much as to make me want to read the rest.
