The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Whenever I hear of a novel that is supposed to cater to bibliophiles (and when I mean cater, I mean pander, absolutely,) I keep getting either mildly disappointed or annoyed that there JUST ISN'T ENOUGH BOOKS. It's always really just a romance or a treasure hunt or something.

And then I get around to Walter Moers.

Not only is it physically overflowing with books and completely fabricated works of art and artists, it's an actual adventure in (and below!) a book city.

Who says writers can't be horribly adventuresome? I mean, it's one thing to just go out of your way to find an actual author for a work you found brilliant, only to get terrified, set up, betrayed, thrown in a labyrinth, meet the (literary) devil, and eventually come out again a changed dinosaur, but it's another thing do come out THIS changed.

Wild imagination here. This is definitely exactly what I want when I look for a book made for book lovers. It's not the only one, of course, but it's definitely at the top of my list. I think of Jeff Noon and Vandermeer when it comes to authors that have gone this far out on a limb.

Welcome to Weird Fiction, my friends. I loooooove it.

View all my reviews