November brings another first: A two-for-one bonus

October has given way to November, but I’m still regularly checking in on the foursome that I call The Books of October. And while none of them are hitting the toppermost of the poppermost just yet (still waiting, world!), there are some encouraging signs along the amazon.

“Los Lobos: Dream in Blue” is up to 14 reviews on amazon, all of them perfect five-star scores. Enough favorable reviews have amassed for “MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson” to pull its overall amazon average above four stars. And “Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt” is still getting great reviews on and off amazon (even, ye Gods, from Pitchfork — a truly unexpected pleasure).

As for yours truly, Team Benson/Menconi’s “Comin’ Right at Ya” has a half-dozen amazon reviews now, all of them five-star, which is a nice start. And in the process of checking up on it the other day, I noticed a brief interlude when I had not one but two entries in the top-20 of amazon’s country-books chart. It came to pass that “Losering” pulled within a couple of spots of “CRAY” — also in the vicinity of yet another friend, Barry Mazor’s Ralph Peer book (which I wrote about in the paper earlier this year).

As you can see below, screen-grabs of such moments are the stuff of cheap-thrill dreams.