Book Review: One More Thing by B.J. Novak (the guy who plays Ryan from The Office)

I’ve gotten into a terrible habit lately. I visit the Buzzfeed website quite often these days, and I frequently find myself clicking through their lists of whatever, marveling at the fact that whatever they come up with seems to be right up my alley. Literally, whatever they combine into some sort of list or tally, such as “21 smells that 90s girls will never forget” make complete sense to me and I feel better for just having read it.   Yes Buzzfeed, how do you do it?  You seem to know everything about my life, and what I’m thinking right now (where can I find a bunch of pictures of fluffy animals all on one page) or tricks I wish I knew to make my mornings easier (morning hacks to start your day). Buzzfeed has it, all these things and more!!! I’m convinced that their staff is made up people who are all distant clones of me and my friends, which explains why everything they produce speaks to easily to everything I am and will ever be interested in.

The short story collection One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is very much like this. It uses the same language that I hear every day and it deals with things that I can easily relate to and understand. For example, the story “One of These Days, We Have to do Something About Willie” is about a group of guy pals who decide to stage an intervention for one of their friends based on his misleading facebook photos. As sad and misguided as it may seem, people of my generation assume they understand or are ‘close’ with someone, simply by following their facebook profile, so as strange as this story seems, it really hit home for me because I could see how this could easily happen in real life.

Aside from the book being extremely relatable, it was also really funny, and the language was fairly succinct. Most of the stories in the collection worked well, there were only a few that I thought could be cut. In total, there are 64 stories in the book, and the ultra short stories that are a couple sentences or less I typically liked the least. The longer stories, like “Sophia” (about a man who orders a sex robot named Sophia, who eventually falls in love with him so he returns her) were fun to read because although they were humorous, they were also meaningful with an intelligent storyline.

This book doesn’t contain the same humour as the television show The Office, so just because Novak is a writer on that show doesn’t mean that will translate into his own personal writing, because it doesn’t. I watched the  trailer  (below) after I finished reading the book which I was thankful for because the trailer wasn’t very funny, even though it had Mindy Kaling in it. But the book is funny, so just read it.