ZOMG!!! KAREN RUSSELL!!!

Okay, so first off, I apologize for the ZOMG thing.  I just wanted to do it.  Just once.  I swear I'll never do it again.  And I apologize if I killed the fun of ZOMGing for all the kids out there, but I already swore I wouldn't start wearing Sillybandz (TM) so I wouldn't make it uncool for my friend's 10 year-old daughter and all the elementary school kids out there who come to me for books every day.

But really, you would be doing it too, if you knew what I knew.  Which is this:

(Are you ready?  Maybe you should sit down.)

Karen Russell has a novel coming out!

Ahem.  Maybe I'm a little overexcited.  It's just that Karen Russell is one of my favorite writers of all time.  Her short stories make me swoon and I'm irredeemably jealous of her vocabulary.  ("Limned."  God, what a perfect word!)  Her short story collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was my favorite read last year, and now she has expanded one of the short stories from that collection into a novel, Swamplandia!  It's coming out in Feb. 1, 2011.  I've been checking Amazon and lurking around the internet looking for news of another story collection -- but a novel!  ZOMG!!!  (Sorry, I couldn't help it.  But it's my prerogative as a book nerd to get worked up about incredibly dorky things like this. Ha!)

LISTENING TO NORAH JONES'S THE FALL

Some thoughts:

1) There is a song involving werewolves.  It's possibly the best song on the album, or maybe it's just the only one I really enjoyed.  I don't know.  I think I'm maybe not Norah Jones's target audience.

2) If her producers had paired her with an actual band and let them do something interesting with the instrumentals, instead of what it seems they did (put her together with session musicians and say, "Don't distract from Norah's vocals!"), I think I would have gone completely starry-eyed over this album.

3) After Nellie McKay's "The Dog Song," no one can really do another song that tries to trick you into thinking the singer is talking about her new boyfriend, when in fact she's talking about her dog.  The definitive "dogs trump men as life companions" song has already been recorded.

4)  What's the plural possessive of Jones?  Jeremy favors AP style, and says it should be "Jones'", but I'm an MLA kind of girl, and I think I've got it right with "Jones's."

Discuss!