So last week I ordered stuff from Amazon. I was mainly ordering the new They Might Be Giants CD & DVD (bonus opinion - meh. I liked No! and even the CD that came with the Bed Bed Bed book, but this alphabet stuff just isn't very interesting. I think TMBG+kids music is cool, but TMBG+Disney+kids is just way over the top). ANYWAY Amazon did one of those "You would probably also like" things and it spit out this Yes that's right, it says "The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal". Now if you think I can resist that . . . well, what can I say? You haven't been paying much attention. When I went for more information it did one of those "buy it with X and save!" with this. Well. I bought them both and pretty much tore through them. Lamb was slow going at first - up until Biff invented sarcasm and taught it to Christ. Then it just got hysterical and stayed that way for the rest of the book. And The Stupidest Angel was a one-day book that I just devoured. Funny and sharp all the way through. Really. My birthday is coming up - buy me more Christopher Moore! :-) If you're local, ask me to borrow these - they rock!

Ok, so in my earlier post about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell I alluded to a "surprise book" I wanted to talk about it. And then in authentic HiddenJester style I got all busy and never followed up. Except I did! Follow up! Right Here! (and stole some stylings from Mimi Smartypants apparently. I've been doing to much archive reading when I should be doing my own writing) So yeah, the book in question is So Yesterday by Scott Westerfield. Embarrassingly, I can't quite explain why I have this book. At some point I read a description of it on a blog and thought the book sounded very cool and dropped it onto my Amazon wishlist. I later decided I didn't like the source blog and dropped it from my reading list. Fast forward several months and I needed one more item to make an order be $25 and have free shipping. So I tossed this book in. The book sat on my nightstand for several months and only got busted out over the Christmas break. Which is a shame because it's my favorite find in recent months. But at this point I don't remember the source of the recommendation, or even much about why I dropped it. I think that blog got all heavy political, you know how that was last summer. So sorry mystery blog author who I forget! You should get a shout-out but I'm a slacker. If you liked the coolhunting aspects of Pattern Recognition, you'll enjoy this book. The protagonist is a young coolhunter who spends a lot of time spotting trends in footwear and advising shoe companies on their advertising. He's not what he calls an "Innovator" - he doesn't create the trends. He watches out for Innovators and pumps the trends back to the big marketing machines. There's a lot of sly commenting on our consumerist culture afoot. He ends up bringing an Innovator into his coolhunting world and then things get . . . complicated in a way I can't explain without spoilers. It's a quick read (his books seem to be classified as "young adult" although I'd say it's a slightly higher reading level than Harry Potter.) and I read it pretty much in one setting. I recommended it strongly to Karin and she seemed to really like it. I had no real preconceptions about this before reading it, but I really quite enjoyed it. I recommend it highly.