Shelf Monkey

Employees of a big-box bookstore band together to combat bad taste in books, and its avatar, one Monroe Purvis, a talk show host who uses his book club (and publishing company) to promote utterly vacuous books; hilarity ensues.

Shelf Monkey is both fun and funny. The fun is in Redekop's continual allusions and borrowings -- you will have to be fearsomely well read to spot them all, and I'm sure I missed many. and the funny, of course, is in his razor-sharp satire of an age where art is "content," to be sold as so much sausage filling.

It's tempting to see Monroe Purvis as a stab at Oprah Winfrey, but he's more than that. Oprah, as even Monroe Purvis points out, actually reads some good books; she's used her position to encourage people to show more read Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Carson McCullers, among others. Purvis is something else again. His publishing company churns out what you might call literary anti-matter, unredeemably vile books dripping with contempt not only for their readers, but for reading itself.

Shelf Monkey is a quick, light read, but not one that you'll easily forget. show less

For starters, I usually prefer not to read books about our time. We live it. We are inundated with it. The news coverage is already overwhelming. The worse it gets out there, the more I long to reread Buddenbrooks.

However...occasionally a book overlaps so closely with my actual life that I not only bother reading it, I really enjoy reading it. (Wow - does that ever sound egocentric!)

Shelf Monkey is, delightfully, one of those. Although the narrator, megabookstore-employee Thomas Friesen, is almost painfully manic, his tastes, his book dreams and his book frustrations are similar to mine. I am even a bit of a shelf monkey myself, volunteering in a school library once a week. (Is anything more pathetic than a librarian wanna-be? We even show more inhabit the same loser-land.)

The premise of the book - bookstore staff jointly working up their frustrations to the point where they snatch an opportunity to attack a talk-show host cum purveyor of trash-fiction - is the set-up for a disquisition on the culture of reading as I guess is experienced by...dare I say it?...most, if not all LibraryThingers. The tone is hard and smart and funny. The story is sufficient unto itself - no padding. Hate padding!

I have promised to lend my copy to a few friends, but I really want to keep it close to hand, to track down the references to books that I couldn't get or re-read the ones that seem like they might bear new fruit. The whole book is like a conversation about books with a smart-ass friend.

And thus, in conclusion, Shelf Monkey rox!

Fun fact: I discovered Corey Redekop here on LibraryThing because I saw that he connected two books I love through Recommendations, and I looked at his profile only to discover he is a writer himself! Go LibraryThing! show less

I didn't know whether to laugh or shudder reading Corey Redekop's Shelf Monkey. So I did both.

The novel tells the tale of failed lawyer turned bookstore widget Thomas, who finds his soulmates in an eccentric group of fellow employees at hypermegabookstore READ. The only problem is they're more crazy than eccentric. They hold secret meetings where they burn offensive books -- you know, Michael Crichton, Candace Bushnell, the Left Behind series -- while assuming the monikers of beloved fictional characters. Oh, Corey, you had me at Yossarian. They have a particular hatred for a book club host called Munroe Purvis, who's sort of a sordid cross between Oprah and Morton Downey Jr. and whose book club selections represent everything wrong show more with western society -- imagine your grandmother's diaries turned into bestsellers, and you'll have an idea of what Purvis's book club represents.

Of course, Purvis isn't what he appears to be, and neither are many of Thomas's bookstore friends. Some of them turn out to be hiding deep secrets about the bookstore, while others are just plain dangerous in the way only geeks can be dangerous. When Purvis goes on tour and comes to town, the secrets and craziness collide as Thomas's friends set out to destroy Purvis, and the novel quickly moves from the Nick Hornby section of the bookstore to the Joseph Heller and Chuck Palahniuk table.

Redekop manages to keep his own voice throughout the novel, while winking, nodding and even raising a beer every now and then to literary culture. He name-drops authors more than a fourth-year English student, and he makes some literary traditions his own, such as adopting the epistolary novel and turning it into an email exchange while Thomas is on the run from the authorities. Even this is a bit of a literary joke for Redekop, though, as the recipient of his emails is Eric McCormack, a real-life Canadian author. At least I think he's a real-life Canadian author. I've never met him, and after reading Shelf Monkey I am beginning to wonder if he's a clever construct on the part of Redekop to flesh out the book.

Shelf Monkey is a literary thriller but it's also a fun romp -- unless, presumably, you're an Oprah fan. But if so, you're not Redekop's imagined audience. His ideal reader knows this book is blackly, blackly funny because it's all too true.

Full disclosure: Redekop gave one of my novels a fine review at his site, but I would have liked this book just as much anyway. show less

Redekop has moments of real wit and he isn’t afraid to push his plot to entertainingly ludicrous extremes. If, ultimately, he winds up glossing over some finer philosophical points about censorship, elitism, taste, and judgement, he at least reminds us of the pleasure, joy, and even lunacy a true love of books can inspire.
See more here.

This is a very very funny novel. It has a rapid fire style which never seems to run out of ammunition aimed at best-sellers self-servingly hyped by high profile literary wanna-bes. The narrator is a likable fellow who loves to read and needs work so logically gets himself a job at a bookstore. Sounds rational, sane? Ahh, but there the rub begins. He meets some kindred spirits at the store and begins to make choices that most would consider unwise. If the narrator and the author have anything in common besides a wicked sense of humour Redekop should be firmly locked in a padded cell next to his favourite shelf monkey...although I hope that is not the case as I look forward to reading more of Redekop`s original wacky work.

There is enough to grind a bibliophile these days. Publishing has become mass production of feel-good entertainment. Independent booksellers have been replaced by mega-box stores. Serious reading appears to be in freefall. Something has to be done. How far would you go for literature?

In Redekop’s debut novel, Shelf Monkey, Thomas Friesen is a lapsed Mennonite and a failed lawyer. Barely staying afloat of depression, Friesen takes a job at a bookstore, READ, “the first circle of Hell, literary limbo, a publisher’s wet dream, the author’s nightmare. A vacuous, arid, vile product of bottom line economics.” Floating above the shelves is a big head, the plump likeness of Munroe Purvis, talk show host, publisher and promoter of the show more worst kind of sentimental drivel. What Purvis endorses, everyone buys. And as Page the manager says, “The customer is always right.”

Thomas feels fortunate to meet kindred literary spirits among the employees. Aubrey is the guru of the Shelf Monkeys, a secret ‘book club’ to which Thomas gets invited. “Some books are simply a waste of paper, a waste of effort both to write and to read.” The flaming cover of this novel is sufficient clue to the book burnings that ensue, inspired by Fahrenheit 451. Books burnings, by the literate?! Only for books deemed not worthy by the members’ code. “We meet, we debate, we burn. It’s therapy, really.” Things escalate quickly and darkly, Lord of the Flies style, and Thomas is compelled to choose between his loyalties to his friends, literature, ethics, and his sanity.

Crafty transitions keep the reader vigilant. I found it odd at first that a novel sympathetic to literature would be written in fragments — news clippings, transcripts, emails — but these forms transition into narrative, especially the emails to real-life writer Eric McCormack (whose novel The Dutch Wife has a character named Thomas; I haven’t read it). Early on I found Thomas to be a disagreeable character, a sorry sort wallowing in his self-created misery. But then he asks his therapist, “You ever get lost in a book, Dr. Newhire?” It is the first hint of an inner depth. The novel is instantly Canadian, replete with references such as Tim Horton’s, Timothy Findley, and the Giller prize. In the face of the expressly American Munroe Purvis, the gentle literate Canadians are terrorists, declaring jihad on the worst of capitalism and publishing. I caution the reader, Redekop can take you into damn frightening places.

Shelf Monkey poses a troublesome question to book lovers and the arts in general. The insanity of book burnings is a no-brainer. Rather, I am talking about setting one type of art above another. I have enjoyed some of the ‘trash’ that gets burned in the novel. Even Aubrey had a copy of The Celestine Prophecy in his collection. Thomas struggles with the snobbery of the Shelf Monkeys. Who is to say which book is good, and which one is bad? As a recent library sciences graduate, Redekop must be familiar with Rosenberg’s motto, “Never apologize for your reading tastes.” As I see it, no one can ever tell what book will speak to a person. Even so, can we never assert a standard of quality?

http://johnmiedema.ca/2008/02/24/it-is-a-pleasure-to-burn-shelf-monkey-by-corey-... show less

A quality I consider to be the hallmark of a good book, I will never walk into a large bookstore in quite the same way after reading Shelf Monkey. In the same way that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle forced everyone to see the ugly side of the meat industry, Corey Redekop enlightens the reader about the realities of just one side of the industry that has been built around this art we all love so much. I am grateful to have my eyes opened with a unique tale. Not only is the plot fascinating, but Mr. Redekop also employs fresh writing techniques to keep the reader on her toes, bringing such underappreciated works as Jean Toomer's Cane to mind.

Indeed, this book is a must for anyone who loves to read enough to have a LibraryThing account.