I will not reveal whether or not that is true of the orange couch featured in Benjamin Parzybok‘s Couch. Early on, the book is about three semi-slacker Portland roommates — a disaffected cult-hero programmer, a small-time con man, and a hippie visionary — who need to move a couch. Very shortly thereafter, the couch-moving, and the book, go sideways and unexpected and enchanting.

I’m late to the party on this book, despite living in the same town as Mr. Parzybok, and having fond memories of the first time I sighted one of his Gumball Poetry Machines. Couch came into my life as part of a big Small Beer Press order I put in near the end of 2009, when they were having an important sale. (Incidentally, they are still having the important sale and you should buy some books from them.)

Anyway, back to Couch. I liked this book a whole lot, and fell into the story in a way that’s increasingly rare for me these days due to double-tracking. A few reasons why:

• The narrative voice is smart, thoughtful, and endearing. I especially like the programmer Thom’s conversations with his brain, which he calls brain, and his occasional lapses into actual programming language.
• The characters are self-aware about being part of a quest narrative. Sometimes I find that trope annoying, but in this case it added to my enjoyment.
• Plus ten for starting out in Portland, in a neighborhood with which I am familiar, and even briefly featuring a particular thrift store of which I am fond. (Trivia for Rules for Hearts fans: the auditions for the Theater Borealis production of Midsummer Night’s Dream take place in the same neighborhood.)

Hm. Now that I’m thinking about it, orange couches play significant roles in two cultural products I enthusiastically endorse:

Wonder if my early imprinting has anything to do with it.

I watched David Simon talking about The Wire and journalism, (warning: don’t watch if you haven’t gotten through Season Five) and I read “Shooting Britney.” The juxtaposition made me think that the only kind of journalism that’s as aggressive as Simon would like it all to be is celebrity journalism.

I saw Veda Hille at the Alberta Street Pub (great, aside from the amount of patchouli being deployed by someone near where we were sitting) and she recognized me and thanked me for the review. Eee!

And I saw Laura Lippman at Powell’s and she was lovely. “I stopped writing villains,” she told us. Then I went home and read Another Thing to Fall in one sitting.

What’s new with you?

• Folks have been blogging about the new Borders “concept stores,” which will feature Travel, Cooking, Wellness, Graphic Novels, and Children’s Books. I wonder if Children’s Books implies YA, too? Also, any time Borders is in the news, I think about the Borders of my Ann Arbor childhood. There was only one store. There was an era when smokers could smoke inside. I remember reading Delia Ephron’s Teenage Romance: Or How To Die Of Embarrassment sitting on one of the wooden benches upstairs, at a time when I thought, daily, that I might. Later, when the Borders I knew had morphed into “Store One” during their first period of serious corporate expansion, a whole bunch of my friends worked there, and going to Borders became as much about visiting them as it was about browsing for new books. Ann Arbor readers, have any of you been to the Concept Store? What did you think?

• And again: I’ll be at Wondercon Saturday and Sunday. Special bonus: for part of the time each day, Mr. Lieber and I will be joined by Mr. Prucher, thus making our table your one-stop-shopping place for young adult novels with queer characters, minicomics about circus performers, graphic novels featuring female federal marshals solving crimes in Antarctica, sketches of your favorite characters (maybe even a Wire Simpsons, if you ask nicely), and science fiction lexicography.

Thanks to Dylan for the heads up!

Anyway: found via the comments thread on Matthew Yglesias‘s site, here are three very short ‘prequels.’  Warning: they won’t make much sense if you haven’t seen the show before. If you haven’t, of course, I urge you with evangelical zeal to get seasons 1-4 on DVD.

Bunk and McNulty (2000, Baltimore, Maryland)

Young Prop Joe (1962, Baltimore, Maryland)

Young Omar (1985, Baltimore, Maryland)

Bunk and McNulty is fun, the uniforms at Prop Joe’s school are a nice touch, but the Omar one is my favorite. It feels like a real character-forming moment, not just fanservice.