One More Thing

This book was a constant surprise in the best way.

I picked up BJ Novak's One More Thing expecting a memoir. I don't entirely know how I got it into my head that this was what he'd written. It was probably just that I'd read so many other memoirs from NBC comedians recently that I figured this had to be another one. 

It's not a memoir. It's a collection of short stories. And when I say short, I mean short. A handful of them are 20 pages long. Most are only a page or two. One has twelve words. Another only nine. The stories themselves are clever. They sneak right up to that line of being too clever, but they never quite crossed it. They were random and delightful and surprisingly profound. They were tied together ever so loosely, with characters making brief cameos in other stories.

This was everything I want out of a short story collection. The stories were brief with hidden depths. Novak doesn't need many words to cut right to the heart of the matter. He created a collection that I read quickly, but whose bits and pieces are still sticking with me. I'm so glad that I picked up this book, and that it was so far from what I expected it to be. It's always nice to find a hidden gem where you weren't expecting one.

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