I loved this book so much I wanted to give it six stars instead of just five. So I carved a new star into the screen of my computer.

Davidson writes like a madman possessed by a drunken saint. Every one of these stories holds more in it than most novels.

Every new communications technology disrupts the previous corporate regimes and threatens to transform the world into an information and artistic utopia -- until the technology is co-opted or suppressed by corporations. Wu lays out how it happened with radio, film and television and shows you how if you think it's different with the Internet, you'd better think again.

This is the first book I turned to when my father died. Not for solace or comfort, but for its sense of the universal in the quietest, stillest moments.

Kevin Chong is my favourite character in CanLit. This is a must-read if you're interested in horse racing. Or you live in Vancouver. Or you know Kevin Chong.

I opened it to a random page and read the following, and I was hooked.

What song did your mother sing to you
she would ask the dying in the hospice,
days or hours before the end.

You know that moment when a building collapses, and all the glass explodes outward, falling in countless ways and directions, each shard reflecting a different scene of the world ' the bystanders looking to see what's happened, the people trying to get away, the disappeared running into the collapse, the others carrying on with their lives and not noticing what's happening, or maybe just pretending it isn't happening ' for just a second before all that glass is lost in the debris cloud and shatters without anyone noticing? This book is that moment.

One of the best and most challenging books I have ever read. It's the apocalypse I've been dreaming about my entire life.

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 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.