Okay, I have no idea how to sum this up except to say that I stood on a kitchen chair for about an hour yesterday, watching a walking stick amble slowly along the angle where the wall meets the ceiling, and every once in a while he'd reach out and grab a little bug -- sometimes a bug too small for me to see -- and he'd devour it and amble on again. It was completely bizarre and beautiful and engrossing, and the experience of reading this book was pretty much just like that.
Here's a bit from the first story, "The Book":
The woman returns from the store with an armload of books. She reads them quickly, one by one, over the course of the next few weeks. But when she opens the last one, the woman frowns in surprise.
All the pages in the book are blank.
Every single one.
The woman takes the book back to the store, but the manager won’t let her return it.
Right there on the cover, the manager says, This book has no words and is non-returnable.
The woman is angry. She wouldn’t have bought the book if she’d known there were no words inside it. But the manager simply will not relent.
The woman leaves in a huff.
She throws the book in the trash.
A few days later, the woman sees a man reading the book on the subway. She gets mad; she screams across the crowded car--
There are no words inside, you can’t read it!
But the man is defensive.
You can pretend, he says. There’s no law against pretending.
I think there might be words if you look at it under a special light, says a woman sitting nearby.
This other woman is holding her own copy of the book.
That’s so stupid! the woman yells. Don’t you see how stupid that is? Don’t you see that’s crazy?
At the next station, a policeman is called and has to break up the fight.
A television crew arrives on the scene.
The woman is interviewed on the news.
She complains loudly about the book for some time.
The next day, the book appears on the bestseller lists, under both fiction and nonfiction...
Visit Ben Loory at The Nervous Breakdown to read the rest of this story, and yeah. Buy this book! It's just a little bit of crazy awesome. And then buy it for someone else and make them wonder about you.
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