Funnybones

Has anybody noticed that it's October?

"Funnybones", by the kids' book mega-couple that is Janet and Allen Ahlberg (half of which was previously written about here ), is not a Halloween book, per se, but is brilliant and weird and funny in every kind of Ahlberg way. The fact that it's about a non-traditional (only in that it is skeletal) family that roams around its English towne at night to create some scares, makes it all the better to seek out this month.

It's crazily easy to get, both new and used, online, at the usual suspects, cheap, though we got our bedraggled and well-loved softcover among the bins at Greg's Walk a Crooked Mile Books, at the Mount Airy train station, here in Philly.

It's sad to me that I may not have ever heard of it were it not for those bins at that shop, which is actually a happy thing, now that I think of it. It's why Amazon-ing and Itunes-ing can never quite replace searching through the stacks of a used record shop, you know? It's the searching, and the finding, and the finding of something else that you had no previous notion of before (And yes, I love iTunes and Amazon, too, by the way).

Anyway, Funnybones, it is, indeed.