One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak

As I've mentioned before, I'm a massive fan of The Office. I started watching it in December and somehow laughed and cried through 9 years of television in two months. Oddly enough, one of my favorite characters in the show is Ryan, the slightly delusional, self-centered jerk who thinks he has everything to prove and spends the entire nine years torturing the heart of his dramatic co-worker Kelly Kapoor. When I did a little more research on the actors behind the show, I found that the actor who played Ryan, B.J. Novak, actually spent most of his time in the writer's room rather than on set in The Office, and actually considers himself a writer, not an actor.



I also found that he recently released a book, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories. During my swift obsession with The Office, I swung by my local bookstore and bought a copy. Luckily, I love short stories, and his absurd sense of humor is right up my alley. I found myself laughing aloud through some of the stories. Some of my favorites were the shortest pieces in the book, lasting only a sentence or two. Although the stories were mostly unrelated, there were several tiny details that connected the stories in a really funny way. They weren't purely for comedy, either. I found some of the stories to have a touching and sad undertone, even if only to end with some ironic punchline, like Kellogg's (or: The Last Wholesome Fantasy of the Middle School Boy), where a boy finds out that he wins a cereal sweepstakes and his parents don't let him cash the prize because his real father is the CEO of Kellogg's.



My top 5 picks from the book were, in order of how they appear in the book:
No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg
Missed Connection: Grocery Spill at 21st and 6th 2:30 pm on Wednesday
Kindness Among Cakes
MONSTER: The Roller Coaster
The World's Biggest Rip-Off




I would recommend the book to fans of short fiction, comedy and the Ryan/Kelly romance.