Joshua Ferris Feels Your Pain. Or Maybe Just Mine. But Quite Possibly, Yours Too.

It took me a long time to find this month's Book You Should Be Reading---there were many false starts and also-rans. I finally stumbled across a worthy contender over the weekend, which I finished last night: Then We Came to the End, a first novel by Joshua Ferris. Almost all of the action takes place in the offices of an advertising firm in Chicago, and you can tell from the opening paragraph that the author has done some hard time in a cubicle. In less skilled hands, this book could have turned into "Dilbert" disguised as a novel, but there's a surprising amount of heart and pathos served up with all of the deadpan humor. You can read an extensive excerpt at the bottom of this blog entry.

Shameful admission: I almost didn't buy this book, because I don't dig the cover art much. It's kind of a canvas of yellow Post-It notes, with the title and author's name Sharpied in red ink. And maybe I'm weird, but to me that smells like Cliche Corporate Thriller. Which this book ain't. You can see the much cooler British cover here.

And a final word about what the deal is with me and hardcovers: I like the idea of supporting young authors, especially first-timers, by purchasing their work in hardcover. My knowledge of how the publishing industry works is fuzzy at best, but I do understand that an author's ability to secure a favorable contract for Book #2 correlates pretty strongly with a respectable sales record for Book #1. So if I find a debut author who I think is talented or original or promising---someone whom I hope to see published again, and soon---I try to hook 'em up with a hardcover book sale.

Also, I know that someday I will own a lovely house, and the lovely house will feature a lovely library, and all of the bookshelves will be overflowing with hardcover first editions of my favorite books. That being said, I promise to hunt down a good paperback for March.