SUPERFUN SASSY EXTRA CONTENT!!!! (and Blake Nelson.)

Hello, jerks.

Okay, so in my ongoing efforts to heroically waste as much of my employers' time as possible, I've now started cataloguing the books I review here on LibraryThing, a superfun website that you should totally use if you are looking to procrastinate instead of

a. writing your thesis
b. moving to the country
c. helping get a great leader elected
d. getting a sex-change in chile
e. helping first-year university students find articles on Chinese foot-binding and its impact on Communist movements in the hinterland when really they'd rather be getting shittered
f. feeding baby triplets
g. painting your porch

ANYWAY, if you click on the My Website link from the Profile page, it'll take you right there. Or just click here like a lazy chump.

Typing the word "Sassy" in the title made me nostalgic for the days when Sassy was in fact an amazing magazine for teenage girls, full of good short stories and real-size models and features that had little or nothing to do with the prom. It was in Sassy that I first read Blake Nelson's writing--it was a short story that eventually became his novel, Girl, which remains one of my very very favourite books. Freya recently pointed out that it's basically a novelization of My So-Called Life. (She also once told me that watching My So-Called Life "explained a lot" about me. I chose to take this as a compliment.) What she failed to realize is that it is also a love letter to the early 90s rock scene in Portland and thrift store shopping and teenage confusion, all written in the best stupid-smart girl first person narration ever executed. I read this book about once a year and remember how wicked it was to be intensely into my friends' bands and pretend to skateboard and wear ratty cardigans. You should too.

Incidentally, Blake Nelson's latest book, Prom Anonymous, just came out. I'm sad to report that he, like Sassy, has fallen into the prom trap. I'm a little disappointed. Also, there's a picture of him on the back flap, and he's not nearly as cute as I'd always imagined he'd be. Another adolescent literary crush bites the dust. Oh well. At least I still have young J.D. Salinger. And with his current recluse status, the odds of seeing a spoil-the-fantasy recent photo are happily slim.