Review by New York Times Review
Odd, obsessive and wildly romantic, Monson's "Letter to a Future Lover" conjures words rarely used to describe a trip to the library. But Monson is on his own trip, and his essays in particular ride against scheme, the strictures of genre and the assumptions of form. "Letter to a Future Lover" assembles in book form what began as a kind of art project: Inspired, per the subtitle, by the "marginalia, errata, secrets, inscriptions and other ephemera" found in books pulled from various library stacks, Monson reshelved each volume with one of his loose-jointed, querying essays tucked inside. "Dear Defacer" addresses the defacer of a volume of gay and lesbian biography; "Dear Future Yooper" greets whoever next checks out Monson's first book of poetry from a library in the author's native Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Each entry asserts a future for old-fashioned reading, one Monson inscribes with sensual as well as metaphysical reward: "Let us spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation," he writes in one essay. "If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Throughout history libraries have testified to what a civilization meant, or wanted to believe it meant. What else is a library but a history of human error? An adventurous stylist and creative thinker, Monson (Other Electricities, 2005; Vanishing Point, 2010), explores libraries and the questions they raise about writing and reading, society and history, life and death in a sequence of clever, fanciful, philosophically inquisitive, intimately anecdotal, poetic, and revitalizing essays. He loves books as objects as well as vessels for text, and he is particularly intrigued by the consequences of numerous people taking home and reading the same borrowed book. He is fascinated by the traces readers leave behind, especially marginalia (photographs included), including the rants of a man he addresses as Dear Defacer. Pairing facts and metaphors, Monson muses about weeding library collections, the difference between reading page and screen, the reasons for changes to Library of Congress subject headings, and much more, continually sprinting off on surprising tangents about music, movies, literature, the Japanese art of repairing cracked ceramics with seams of gold, and glimpses into his past. Monson visits a prison library in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the Biosphere 2 library, considers the backseat library on a plane, and imagines creating a chronological library of every book you've read. Monson's heady riffs and profound meditations lead to poignant thoughts about our memory libraries what is retained, how we retrieve them, and what is lost. Monson's vivid, mind-whirling essays add up to a dynamic and idiosyncratic celebration of libraries that expands into a delectably labyrinthine, provocative, and affecting inquiry into nothing less than how we preserve and share human experience.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his highly quirky, sometimes frustrating collection of short essays, Monson reflects on the communal experience of reading books in libraries and on the nature of libraries themselves. He recalls the pleasures of card catalogues and wonders which books were stored in a now-empty library. He makes the point that the voices that speak to us from books are not always the ones the author intended; sometimes readers leave comments in a book's margins, or pieces of paper between its pages. One of the more intriguing and effective essays is his open letter to those who have defaced books with their own bigoted or outraged commentary. Most of his pieces began life as ephemera themselves, with Monson leaving them in library books. There are moments of insight and delight, and the idea of exploring literally marginal writings is a bright one, but Monson's idiosyncratic presentation and prose style can be exasperating, walking a fine line between self-reflection and self-indulgence. The essays are offered alphabetically, and the author's advice (given in the second essay, "AI") is to dive right in and read them in whatever order one wishes. In this respect, his book is gracious and respectful toward its intended readers, even if it may prove inaccessible to some of them. Illus. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this collection of essays on the secret lives of books, as seen through marginalia, sidenotes, personal collections, and reader histories, Monson (English and creative writing, Univ. of Arizona; Vanishing Point) weaves together thoughts on life, loss, lust, libraries, and everything in between-a celebration of bibliophilia in a neat little package that draws the reader in as it considers the wonder of books and their infinite histories. The "letters" (or essays) can be read in any order, as Monson reminds us, each epistle contains its own subtle bit of wisdom. This is a hard book to describe, packed with information and insight on any number of topics, from library catalogs to memory to the days of Biosphere 2. It defies expectation and is much more than memoir or meditation, bringing the reader into an intimate conversation that sparks the imagination with thoughts on what might be. VERDICT As a whole, this experimental and genre-bending work is difficult to categorize for specific readers. It is suitable for academic libraries, particularly those collecting in areas such as creative writing, philosophy, or literary theory, or for readers who enjoy books on the history of the book and libraries in general. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]-Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib. (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Short essays on libraries, literature and life.As an eclectic writer, editor and academic, Monson (Nonfiction/Univ. of Arizona; Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, 2010, etc.) defies conventional continuity to make leaps of connection, not only between paragraphs, but even within a sentence. He continues to challenge the very meaning of meaning, daring readers to come to terms with "the book, the book about the book," and the very concept of the library, be it public, prison, personal, seed, digital or abandoned and repurposed. "A library is a synonym for slow, a silent coil into the past's dust," he writes. "Quick transmission of anything here won't get you anywhere." Monson writes of the future reader, even lover, with whom he connects through a book and of the life that you leave behind, not merely in the books that you've written, but the ones you've read: "You get at least two afterlives. One resides in memory, not yours, but another's. You don't get to choose whose. The other is in the disposition and dispersion of your books." These essays are more often playful than impenetrable, though they defy easy paraphrase or analysis. The author suggests early on that readers start with the section called "How to Read a Book," which he places in the middle of this book and which he begins, "Read this first. Or read this last." He later advises to use the book "like a game. Reading is participation, but I want more of you. So mark it up. Annotate a page. Trade a boring essay with another copy." Each reader will have a different experience with the book, which the author suggests is as much the reader's book as the writer's. Writing that requires a receptive readership as flexible as the prose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
