Zogworld

Review

Rating: 8

Hello my name is David and I am a Bibliophile.

Shelf Monkey was given to me by my brother-in-law Scott with the note “you have got to read this, anyone that has worked in a book store will love this”. I have worked 3 years at a Borders and 6 months at a Barnes and Noble. Borders wins hands down.

Thomas only wants a simple life. A decent job and a good book to curl up with. He lands a job a READ (or is that READ (red)) and thinks all had fallen into place. He gets to be snarky with customers over book choices, makes fun of the muzak playing (this sort scene is so real it is unreal) and general get to banter back and forth over the virtues of bookness and bookitude. All are conversations I have had with my fellow bookers. It was very surreal to relive those (very good) times.

Thomas is invited and joins a group calling themselves the Shelf Monkeys who live a pseudo-cult life that debates , burns and destroys the lesser books. They have ritualistic meetings with hoods and bonfires and code names. It is a book fiends finest dream.

They decide to take down Monroe (think a fatter, eviler Murray Povach) whose book club promotes (and produces) about the worst things that could ever happen to a tree. They follow through the dark dreams of many a bookseller .

The book’s characters are fantastic and my personal relationship with bookstores to this day only made them more real. I knew all of the people in the book. Some of them were physically one person I knew (or know) fused with the personality of another. My brother fused with a best friend, an old manager fused with an owner of a small independent bookstore (Between Books RULES!). They were all real and the conversations were the same ones I had in our pseudo intellectual banter in the back room while unpacking the latest Oprah book.

As I read this I was of two minds of how we would have reacted to this when I worked in Borders. Would we have celebrated it or felt betrayed that our own magical curtain had been pulled aside? I think personally I would have placed it on a display surrounded by the “evil” books with some remarkably snooty comment from Richard Feynman about gravitation pull from greater bodies on lesser.

Check Out Corey Redekop’s groovy blog, named perfectly: shelfmonkey.blogspot.com