Braddy Reads The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories

Eh. Technically, it's The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 2. But I'm not going to be picky.

No doubt the main reason I picked this book up was the name on the cover. I'd never heard of "wirrow," but the co-author is actor and groovy fellow Jonathan Taylor Thomas Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, who has apparently set up a kind of collaborative creative workforce online called HITRECORD.

It's a pretty impressive endeavor - hundreds (thousands?) of contributors share little bits and pieces of ideas that get compiled together into larger and more polished products. It reminds me a lot of what Creative Commons was supposed to be all about, and it's equally inspirational. In my mind, HITRECORD seems like it functions the way intellectual property SHOULD function - credit given where credit is due, but ideas aren't really OWNED (or, rather, monopolized) by anyone.

But none of that really answers the most important question: Is their stuff any GOOD?

Well, yeah. I think so. You can see some of the videos they've come up with on their website, and they hold up pretty well, although having contributing talent from JGL and Gary Oldman (and a singer who I'm pretty sure is Zooey Deschanel) certainly helps.

And The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories (Volume 2) holds up pretty well on its own, too. The illustrations are often a little on the childish side - almost like what you'd see in the margins of a high-schooler's notebook - and the little stories sometimes verge on "emo." But that's not to the work's detriment. It's the synthesis of well-intentioned amateurish talent into something greater that makes these tiny stories fun to read. They are at times funny, poignant, and thought provoking. It's exactly what it says it is: a collection of tiny stories, some less than a sentence long, each packed with implied narrative and emotion.

The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories seems like it'd make a great gift for the hipster in your life, but I'm pretty sure, if you give it a chance, you'd like it, too.