The commentators of Mondo, poking their heads out of the digital stronghold that is the Mondo Group, feel it’s time once again to lay waste to the myths of pop culture. Allow their composite intellectual prowess and ingenious insights to flood your eyes as they contemplate the objects generally known as books.

Aaron Fleming:

There’s a bench in a corner of cyberspace where sits Web 2.0 guru Eric Berlin and karate enthusiast Mary K. Williams. Under the ripples of parochial anecdotes intercut with voracious laughter can be heard a quaint discussion of literature. Names radiate from the interlocutors – Joe Finder, Colin Harrison, James Rollins, agents of the prose, architects of the fiction, handles fronting book covers the world over. Titles are swapped with lightning haste as EB and Mary K prod each other’s brain for common literary ground. Then, a puncture in the civility, tranquility smote by vulgar curiosity, for out from the shadows emerges the voyeur, tattered clothing and reeking of stale lager. Furrowed brow, he approaches them. The duo catch his shadow and go to turn towards him but are already on the receiving end of a barrage of unlettered questions: “Those names, who are they?” “Is everyone familiar with they?” “Why am I not?”

Long into the night went the inquisition. During this time pedagogues EB and Mary K taught the voyeur about the aforementioned authors, using with efficacious aplomb charts and graphs showcasing myriad New York Times Best Seller List statistics. When their exposition ended with bibliographic fervour, one question remained on the lips of the voyeur: “Why do you read them?”

That is also the question to be posed here – how does one choose what book to read? What are the stratagems of selectivity put into operation when addressing the multitude of works published annually, not to mention the overwhelming scope of past publication? Why give up your valuable time to gaze upon the pages of one particular book and not another? What underlying motives impel one reader to seek out a verbose epistolary narrative from the 18th century, while another surrenders to the allure of the latest ghost-written biography? Are the critical opinions overloading review sections across the media spectrum accorded significance, or is the process of canonization more likely to affect one’s choice? How can one possibly entertain the idea of cracking open the latest Booker Prize winner when all those Dostoevsky’s and Proust’s lie scattered in the past unread? Is a balance between fiction and non-fiction taken into account, or is mood everything when prowling the local bookshop?