Shelf Monkey - Corey Redekop
Thomas Friesen has three goals in life. Get a job. Make friends. Find a good book to curl up with. After landing a job at READ, the newest hypermegabookstore, he feels he may have accomplished all three.
All is not peaceable within the stacks, however. Dis content is steadily rising, and it is aimed squarely at Munroe Purvis, a talk show host whose wildly popular book club is progressively lowering the IQ of North America.
But the bookworms have a plan. Plots are being hatched. The destruction of Munroe is all but assured. And as Thomas finds himself swept along in the maelstrom of insanity, he wonders if reading a book is all it's cracked up to be.
Definitely a zippier read than the last one, although I have to admit, not what I was expecting. I was kind of expecting some fairly light-hearted satire about working in a bookstore, maybe something almost along the lines of Microserfs or JPod (assuming the latter - which I have not yet read - is anything like the TV show - of which a few episodes I have seen) filled with hilarious situatins that, as a fellow bookseller, I could totally relate to and laugh along with. The "destruction of Munroe" would, I figured be some sort of hilarious prank that would humiliate and utterly discredit him, but be ultimately harmless. But that is not what this book is.
For starters, aside from describing Thomas's first few days at the bookstore, while he acclimatizes to what it's like to work there, the book doesn't really deal with working there at all. It's much more about the relationships between the people, and their relationships with books. It especially focuses on the Shelf Monkey meetings, where a group of disaffected bookstore employees, tired of having the sell utter crap to customers at the expense of good stuff, gather together to burn copies of some of the offending crap.
Then there's Munroe Purvis. When I sarted reading, I assumed he was supposed to represent Oprah and her omnipresent book club, and booksellers' mild to severe aggravation about that. However, as even the book points out, while it's irritating that people won't read something amazing like A Fine Balance, for example unless Oprah tells them to, and then you better believe they're all over it, the fact remains that she does pick such things. If you look back at Oprah's picks, there is some pretty fantastic stuff in there. There's the occasional tripe, too, but yeah. She picks some decent stuff. Munroe Purvis, on the other hand, is basically blatantly opposed to anything worthwhile. His picks are exclusively overwrought, heartwrenching, steaming piles of crap. Redekop must have had a blast writing a few excerpts from one of these books, because it is the most painfully, nauseatingly saccharine bit of tripe I've ever had the dubious pleasure of reading (Oh who am I kidding. I loved reading it. Actually laughed out loud about it. But would definitely hurl a book across the room if I ever had to read more than one page of such inanity.). So he was a great maddeningly omnipotent presence, and all the customers his mindless zombies, ready to chew up the latest dreadful offering from him, and while we real-life booksellers may not have it quite that bad, we can definitely still relate to everything that goes on as a result of this man and his atrocious books.
Except the final thing. As I said before, I fully expected some sort of prank that would be funny. But what the Shelf Monkeys ultimately ended up doing was pretty intense and horrifying. And while I understand their frustration, yeah. It really changed some of the characters in my view, and makes them much less likable, because no one deserves what they did, really. I can sort of get behind the ones who, like Thomas, got swept up in it, but as soon as it was over, went "Oh my god, what did we do?", but a few of them seemed to still believe, even after the mania wore off, that what they did was perfectly justified, and it's kind of hard to accept that.
But there it is. And lest you think I don't think it was good, I did. It was a good book. Quick read, quite compelling, and for sure relatable, at least in some places, if you've ever worked with books. Just be warned that it's not as light-hearted as you might think.
Next up: Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
All is not peaceable within the stacks, however. Dis content is steadily rising, and it is aimed squarely at Munroe Purvis, a talk show host whose wildly popular book club is progressively lowering the IQ of North America.
But the bookworms have a plan. Plots are being hatched. The destruction of Munroe is all but assured. And as Thomas finds himself swept along in the maelstrom of insanity, he wonders if reading a book is all it's cracked up to be.
Definitely a zippier read than the last one, although I have to admit, not what I was expecting. I was kind of expecting some fairly light-hearted satire about working in a bookstore, maybe something almost along the lines of Microserfs or JPod (assuming the latter - which I have not yet read - is anything like the TV show - of which a few episodes I have seen) filled with hilarious situatins that, as a fellow bookseller, I could totally relate to and laugh along with. The "destruction of Munroe" would, I figured be some sort of hilarious prank that would humiliate and utterly discredit him, but be ultimately harmless. But that is not what this book is.
For starters, aside from describing Thomas's first few days at the bookstore, while he acclimatizes to what it's like to work there, the book doesn't really deal with working there at all. It's much more about the relationships between the people, and their relationships with books. It especially focuses on the Shelf Monkey meetings, where a group of disaffected bookstore employees, tired of having the sell utter crap to customers at the expense of good stuff, gather together to burn copies of some of the offending crap.
Then there's Munroe Purvis. When I sarted reading, I assumed he was supposed to represent Oprah and her omnipresent book club, and booksellers' mild to severe aggravation about that. However, as even the book points out, while it's irritating that people won't read something amazing like A Fine Balance, for example unless Oprah tells them to, and then you better believe they're all over it, the fact remains that she does pick such things. If you look back at Oprah's picks, there is some pretty fantastic stuff in there. There's the occasional tripe, too, but yeah. She picks some decent stuff. Munroe Purvis, on the other hand, is basically blatantly opposed to anything worthwhile. His picks are exclusively overwrought, heartwrenching, steaming piles of crap. Redekop must have had a blast writing a few excerpts from one of these books, because it is the most painfully, nauseatingly saccharine bit of tripe I've ever had the dubious pleasure of reading (Oh who am I kidding. I loved reading it. Actually laughed out loud about it. But would definitely hurl a book across the room if I ever had to read more than one page of such inanity.). So he was a great maddeningly omnipotent presence, and all the customers his mindless zombies, ready to chew up the latest dreadful offering from him, and while we real-life booksellers may not have it quite that bad, we can definitely still relate to everything that goes on as a result of this man and his atrocious books.
Except the final thing. As I said before, I fully expected some sort of prank that would be funny. But what the Shelf Monkeys ultimately ended up doing was pretty intense and horrifying. And while I understand their frustration, yeah. It really changed some of the characters in my view, and makes them much less likable, because no one deserves what they did, really. I can sort of get behind the ones who, like Thomas, got swept up in it, but as soon as it was over, went "Oh my god, what did we do?", but a few of them seemed to still believe, even after the mania wore off, that what they did was perfectly justified, and it's kind of hard to accept that.
But there it is. And lest you think I don't think it was good, I did. It was a good book. Quick read, quite compelling, and for sure relatable, at least in some places, if you've ever worked with books. Just be warned that it's not as light-hearted as you might think.
Next up: Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer