Shelbey Monae on Deconstructing Literary Excellence + Healing Through Smut

Are you reading for the heart, the mind, or the coochie? This week on We Read Smut, Alesia is joined by Shelbey Monae, the powerhouse behind Shelbey and the Book Club and co-host of The League of Extraordinary Readers podcast. Shelbey shares her journey from an English major trained to strictly analyze literature to finding the radical joy and healing power of Black indie romance.

Shelbey Monae is a bookish content creator, YouTuber, and community leader dedicated to diversifying reading habits with an emphasis on Black and brown authors. After a transformative health journey involving open-heart surgery, Shelbey has rebuilt her platform as a space for deep critique, laughter, and intentional reading.

In this episode, we're discussing:

• Shelbey discusses how stepping outside the mediocre canon of college literature led her to discover the vibrant world of Black indie romance and Kindle Unlimited.
• A hilarious and honest look at why regular Tuesday sex on the page isn't enough, and why exploring sexual fluidity and fantasies in books is a vital safe space for Black and brown women.
• Shelbey explains the importance of moving beyond feelings as facts to understand genre, style, and technique, even when a book scares or triggers you.
• Why creatures and aliens (specifically Venom) are sometimes more attractive than men in the real world dating scene.
• How to navigate the celebrity effect of podcasting by setting conscious boundaries with yourself on what to share—and what to keep just for the cousins.

"Multiple things can be true at once. You can be well-read and read coochie books." This week, we challenge you to pick up a book that challenges your lived experience and find the art in the fun.

CONNECT WITH Shelbey Monae:

YouTube

BookClub

Instagram

Podcast

Books & Authors Mentioned

A Virgin Surrogate & A Underboss (Amazon)

Jesmyn Ward

Natasha Bishop

ML Bash (specifically for poly romance)

KC Mills (The Collective series)

Nikki Payne

Shon (Don't Run)

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Sadeqa Johnson

Transcript

Alesia Galati 0:00

Reading for fun is probably one of the most important parts of being a romance reader. But it's important that we're reading not just our lived experience, but outside of it as well. Today we have Shelby Monet on to talk all about reading critically, diversely, having a YouTube channel, a book club, and so much more. Listener discretion is advised. This podcast contains mature content intended for adult audiences only. Hello, Shelby. I'm so excited for this conversation. We are gonna have so much fun. If you could start by telling everyone a bit about your reading journey.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Yes, thank you for having me. So I am Shelby Monet of Shelby in the Book Club. I have been a reader since I was a child. So I am my mother's only child, and my mother is also her mother's only child. And the best way I can put it is all my hobbies don't require anybody else. Me and my mother like to be alone but together. She is my bestie. I watched my mother be a reader. She would take me to book signings. We'd go to the bookstore, she'd buy me books and write little notes in them for me. So I've always been a reader, which led to me wanting to be an English major and grand time. I read so much stuff that I thought was mediocre in a sense, because at home I had access to Tony Morrison and like all of these black authors from Indy to James Baldwin, right? And then at school, like on a college level, there wasn't much black literature. And I was just like, something is not right because y'all are making me read this stuff and you're telling me that it's great. And maybe it is, but like there are things on my mama's bookshelf that is way more tantalizing than this. So after college, things dropped off. The beginning of 2020, like the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, I went through a really bad breakup. I thought this man was the love of my life. I thought that was it for me. And I knew that this was gonna be transformative. I knew that if I said goodbye to him, it was going to open other doors for me. And I was terrified, but I said, how are we gonna heal this? Is I'm gonna get back to the things that I love. And reading was one of them. I'm like, okay, who are the new black authors? I found it very difficult to find them, which was alarming to me because I'm like, I know they're out there. Like, we can't all just be reading Tony Morrison. And there's nothing wrong with Tony Morsen. I'm a huge Tony Morrison fan, but there's more out there. There has to be. I know there is. And I started sharing my thoughts on the things that I was reading. That's how I discovered Jasmine Ward. She is one of my all-time faves. And people that were following me were like, we want to do this more. I decided to start Shelby in the book club. So it's been going on six years of me running my book club and yapping about books. A couple of years ago, I did get really sick, so I stopped for a little while. I had open heart surgery. We found out that I also have a brain malformation. So I've been like the last like year and a half has been me rebuilding a bit because I had to stop because of my health. So reading has always been a part of my life. I've always loved words. I tell people all the time. It's very interesting how you can string words together to create a sentence that creates a world and you can transport, and you literally can go anywhere. You can open a book and go anywhere, any decade, any town, any country, any planet. And I think that's really cool. So that's my reading journey.

Alesia Galati 3:44

Oh, that's so cool. Now, I had a conversation, I don't know, it might have been 2021 with someone who was an English major. She went to Yale and she does copy editing and copywriting and all that stuff. And she was like, I cannot read for fun. Like I'm trying to do it, but everything is written so terribly. And you mentioned something before we hit record about like having to almost retrain yourself how to read for fun. So what was that experience like? Maybe for anyone who's maybe feeling the same.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

So when I first started reading again back in 2019, 2020, I was looking for what I considered real literature. I was looking for literary fiction, historical fiction. I was looking for things along those genres because I feel like as a literature major, that's what they taught me was real. If it's traditionally published, if it has some sort of substance to it, it is real literature. And anything that is outside of that, like I know they talk about Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters and all of that, but like even romance is very much looked upon as this like fru-fru girly, like it's something to do, but it's not literature. When I look back on the reader that I was, I was very harsh on literature. I was opening books to analyze them because that's what I was trained to do. And I think about it in the sense, like, my career-wise, I come from a banking background. There are certain things in my mind from banking that you couldn't pry it out of my head with your bare hands. The way that I count my money, the way that every time I go to an ATM, I check the ATM first to make sure there are no skimming devices or whatever. Like the way that I look out for fraud, like just little things, it's the same thing with being an English major. They taught me to analyze literature, how it sounds, how words flow, how sentences are put together, why this may connect here, and all of those sorts of things. So it took me reading romance again, specifically black indie romance, to step outside of myself and say that literature can be fun. It just can. He could be the finest drug dealer this side of the Mississippi and never have been to jail. Okay, just murdering people all around the town. But he loves this woman the way that she is supposed to. It don't have to make sense, girl. It's a book. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. But also understanding, right? Because I think sometimes I find the divide. I find people like myself that have a literary background, they were trained to analyze lit. But then I have the people that grew up loving literature and just stuck with reading that are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Where it's like, okay, from my perspective, I understand why some people don't want to read urban fiction, not necessarily because of writing is bad, but because of the stereotypes it perpetuates, right? And we gotta think big. And sometimes when you are a big brain girly, it's hard not to not think big. It's hard to dumb yourself down sometimes. It feels like you have to shrink yourself in order to enjoy things. But I've just learned to live in the duality. Like sometimes I just want something fun where he drives a car. The one I read the one herb fiction a couple weeks ago, where she was a surrogate for this like mafia dude or whatever, and the doctor switched up the egg. So he put the wrong egg in her, or the wrong baby, or whatever terminology that is, that I'm butchering. So he finds her, they end up falling in love, and she's like, Well, things are moving really fast. Like, I know that we're starting to like each other and that I am pregnant with your baby, but let's still take it so or whatever. And he's like, Well, I want you to move in with me so that I can guarantee your safety. And she's like, I already have a home. And he buys the pickup truck from her neighbor and drives it into the front of her house and was like, now you don't have one. And I said, I don't think a man has ever liked me. I don't think one has ever liked me before. I don't think I've ever like this. The passion. The man is quick on his feet, okay? He can solve problems. He said, I got one better for you. How about we get rid of the house? There is now a hole in the front of your house. You can't live here, not with my baby. No man has ever liked me. It just can be fun. If you are someone that has read a lot, right? With most of us that are creating content, we read between 50 to 100 plus books a year. We read a lot of things. You can see that these people are trying. It's not like they are just writing Dr. Seuss tales on a piece of paper and trying to sell it to us, right? There's world building. There are family trees that are massive and all of these interconnections. If I am actually a lover of literature, I can find the art in it all. Even the ones that I may not necessarily enjoy. I should still be able to see the vision of why you may enjoy it. You just gotta have fun. It don't gotta make sense. It really don't. I be in here up in the middle of the night like mommy. Okay. He took her on a plane. All right. And they flew to fucking Dubai in five minutes. Who cares? Everything doesn't have to be so strenuous. And once I started really just letting myself have fun, it started with some contemporary romance. So Natasha Bishop at the time was technically an independent author, but she leans more contemporary romance than she does smut. That was like my little gateway drug. I was like, wait a minute, I like Rome. What y'all talking to me about? Then they open me up to the world of Kindle Unlimited. And I'm like, there are so many black authors on there that I would have never had access to. So then that's how I found ML Bash. She wrote this. I'm gonna have to look up the title for you, but it's a poly romance. It was the first one that I ever read. I put that Kindle down and I said, I think I need a husband and a boyfriend. I think that's okay for me.

Alesia Galati 10:05

And I think they need to be boyfriends.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

I think they at least need to be best friends. I see that for myself now. It has opened me up to a world that I did not know that was possible for me. So it was like those were my little gateway drugs. Then I came across Casey Mills and she has this series, the collective series, I believe it is, where it's two brothers and their like brother-in-law, and each one of them has a story. Sign me up. Yes. I would be missing out on all of this if I still had a stick in my ass about what real literature is and the representation of women that look like me being loved that I didn't have access to as a kid. I didn't, my mom is a single parent. I can maybe name on my hand the amount of healthy relationships I saw growing up. So I'm like, the only time that I've gotten to see women that look like me be loved loud and confidently are in these books. How else was I supposed to know it was possible, right? How are black and brown women supposed to know that they can be sexually fluid without these examples? Because in our waking lives, y'all tell us we gotta be prim proper, we gotta put it together, we can't be whatever, even though you spend all of our lives sexualizing us.

Alesia Galati 11:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

All of our lives. And then as soon as we turn between 18 to 25, you're like, where's the man and the baby? Girl, who was supposed to teach me how to date? What am I supposed to be doing? There are all of these things, like all of these experiences that you can get from just reading a good old-fashioned coochie book. Sometimes you just need you just need a couple of pages of a man folding a woman like a pretzel, okay? Putting her through the mattress to change your life around because it's fun. And don't get me in the creatures. Oh, I love a good creature. I love a good creature. When I admit it out loud to my mother, I said, I think venom is attractive. She was like, the alien.

Alesia Galati 12:13

I'm over here like say less. Yes, girl.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

I'm like, he's big, okay.

Alesia Galati 12:24

What that tongue do, though. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_02 12:26

I'm saying, like, he as a girl that's tall, I'm a tall girl. I'm always been a thicker girl. God stopped making tall men a long time ago. Okay. So my pickings are slim. Venom could toss me around with ease. A girl could only dream. A girl could only dream because at best, I'm probably gonna marry a man that's my height. Okay. So, yes, Venom is very attractive because he's funny, his tongue is really long, and he's big and tall.

Alesia Galati 13:01

I'm here for it. Oh, so true. And we'll get into books for the mind, the heart, and the coochie in a second. Before we get into that, we're doing this segment, our hot takes on bookish content. And I always give people the like the preview before we get in, just so that everybody's prepared. But this hot take is interesting. When I read it the first time, we both made very similar expressions. Like, what the fuck was the expression? So this person's hot take is that it is okay to have problematic characters, including racist, sexist, homophobic, problematic characters, that it's not a bad thing, that these characters actually add to the story and reinforce how terrible these people are. And that you can't always have a book where every character is morally just feeling feelings, that it doesn't, that it doesn't make it realistic to what the real world is like, and stories need someone who's an antagonist. And then they also added that just because an author writes problematic characters does not mean the author has the same beliefs, which I agree with to an extent. Yeah, they're like levels. Someone made a comment, I don't know, it was a couple months ago, they had made a thread and they were like, a redeeming quality is not racism, like where they have a redeeming arc to this, you can't change that in a person. Yeah. The toilet seat up, okay, we can work with that. Right. But racism is not a redeemable quality at all.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

But you know what? So that kind of goes to what they're saying. I think people don't realize that if an author is writing that like racism is a redeeming quality, it's because that's a that's their reality. That's in their reality somewhere. Where whether they want it to be a redeeming quality for themselves or for people around them, that's a lived thing. I don't think people realize the thought that has to go into writing, but also that it comes from your brain. And a lot of things that come from your brain are from your lived experience. So it's like they got that from somewhere.

Alesia Galati 15:29

Yeah. Where did they get it from?

SPEAKER_02 15:31

Where did they get it from? I wanna know. Because the morally good people, or even not even the morally good people, right? The people with sense at least are gonna say, I'm not gonna write that in my book because they're gonna think that it's me. They at least gonna think about it at a minimum. They're gonna run it past the group chat right fast and say, Hey, I have this idea. How this sound to y'all? And when the group chats say, baby, that's leave that in here with us, don't put that out into the ether. They're at least gonna think about it, right? The people that are putting these characters that are not so great, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they don't realize it. They don't realize the magnitude or the reach of their work. But a lot of times I do think that they know and they're just not ready to face it in themselves.

Alesia Galati 16:18

That is so true. And like I understand wanting to have this big bad character who's a side character, who's the antagonist of the story. But do they always have to be homophobic, racist, and sexist? Right.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

Like, so there is, I'm not gonna name any names, but there is a urban fiction series out that is very popular. And I read it, if that wasn't last summer, it was the summer before. And before I get to talking my shit, I want to say that it is very entertaining, it pulls you in like reality TV. It's messy and it goes very fast, right? Like, I was listening to the audiobooks, and literally, like, I listened to six books in four days. Like I was like hooked, right? But as I started reading more urban fiction, I realized some flaws in the characters in this first series where I was just like, oh, we can have representation of black men that are drug dealers or gang members or whatever the case may be that still have moral standing, right? They are the men that are saying, like, oh yeah. And I understand the issues with me selling drugs in my community, but I also understand that as a black man, there may not have been any other way for me to build myself up and to get money and to be able to take care of the city that I come from. He's not beating women, he's not raping anybody, he's not doing any of those things, right? And the people that he does have to put his hands on is because they stole his money, they was fucking with his drugs, they was doing something to him that they ain't had no business doing. There's a code. There are things you don't mess with women and children, you don't do certain things outside of that. In that first series, the male main character that when I say everybody loves him, he did something really messed up. Granted, it is pitched to us like an accident, but the accident affects the female main character that he knows that he did this thing that's wrong, but still gets her to fall in love with him. And I was like, Am I the only person that can read? Do we not understand what's happening here? That's not right. And it's not as if she has some awakening as a woman and realizes what he did and says, Nope, we're not gonna do that. I'm not gonna, I can't be with you anymore, whatever. I feel manipulated, which she should have, and all of this stuff. No. What she says to him is, you know, if you really just take the time to find God, we can make this work. And I'm like, do we not see the issues with that? Yes, it's fictional, but do we not understand that this is a projection of these people as a race, right? People are reading this and then projecting that onto us in the outside. So the same thing works when they are writing books, they're getting it from somewhere, it's coming from somewhere, whether it's a personal belief, whether it's something that they granted and then pass down to them or something, it's an issue. And everybody doesn't have to be the worst human on the planet in order to be a villain.

Alesia Galati 19:26

Yeah. And some of these main characters, sometimes I feel like they are the villain with some of the stuff they put the women through. Right.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

You'll be reading these books like girl, stand up, get it together, girl. Tighten up. It's not even worth it at the end of the day. No. I tell people all the time, have you met men? Have you met them? Have you dealt with them for longer than five minutes? Do you think that if I could be attracted to a different species, I would you think this is not innate? My body just reacts to them.

Alesia Galati 20:03

Case in point, Venom.

SPEAKER_02 20:05

Right. If Venom could come get me right here today, I would go. I would be like, is there a way for you to get my books? Are there books where we are going? Everything else you can figure out, okay? You the big bad man in this relationship. I will let you handle it. We just need to sort my books out, okay? And will I be able to FaceTime my mother at least twice a week? Okay? Because I would go. Men are ridiculous. So it's just like I said to you before we started recording, for a bunch of bitches that read books all the time, they are not thinking, they're not smart. And it's disheartening because I'd be rooting for us.

Alesia Galati 20:52

Like in the people who have been in the bookish space before 2020 or even before the last like year or so, that a lot of us, especially the ones, those of us that are creating content and have been pushing these authors and like shouting them out, that we're kind of burnt out. Yes. At this point, like we are tired. There's these flash in the pan people that are coming up all of a sudden, and they're getting all the accolades and the praise. And it's like, I've literally been doing the work for years, and it's exhausting.

SPEAKER_02 21:28

Just shut it down and just go read my books. Right. And then it's I feel like as soon as I start to feel that way, somebody sends me a message and they're like, I would have never read this book had you not said something. Or I've read so many things outside of my comfort zone because you suggested it. And then I'm like, damn it. I'd have to get up and keep going. Yes. Like I had an exit plan. I was about to quit. And they be like, nope, nope, come back. The people need you. So I totally get it. Especially because lately I want to have deeper conversations. I want to go deep. Like, I want to have those things. And it's like all of these very surface level things where I'm like, this is boring. It's not fun.

Alesia Galati 22:16

Yeah. I want to go deeper. And that's why I love podcasting. I know you have a podcast as well, but it's one of my favorite things about podcasting is it's just us two going as deep as we want, being able to have this deep conversation. Then everybody can listen in later, or we can edit things out later if we want to. Right. But we can just shoot the shit and like actually have these deeper, more meaningful conversations. And that's honestly why I don't like doing reels. You won't catch me dancing and hear all the books that I read. No, let's go sit and talk about them.

SPEAKER_02 22:48

Let's go sit and talk about them. My podcast is called The League of Extraordinary Readers, if anybody wants to listen. And we Jess and I go deep. We like to read a lot of the hard things, a lot of the heavy things, as people would name them. But that stuff has always been interesting to me. Like I feel like it bridges the gap between it makes history tangible. That's what it is. That's what I like about it. It goes from just being statistics and just a number on a page or a date that you have to remember for a test to adding the emotion so you can actually understand how they were feeling and what they were doing and so on and so forth. So I'm glad that Jess and I have the outlet because we both, oh brother, we can't don't say this online. Might the people might, or whatever. Everything is, oh, don't say that, you're bashing the author. I'm like, and me, I like to talk shit. So I'm having to remind people, listen, I can show you bashing. You won't talk about bashing somebody.

unknown 23:44

Right.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

We could talk about bashing. Okay. What I do is give critique. What I'm doing is getting y'all to think a little different, right? To expand your vantage point. Because if we're only reacting to things based on how they make us feel, are we actually comprehending them? The answer is no. The answer is no, because feelings aren't fact. And I think that's something we can kind of apply to all areas in our life. Like imagine you're having a conversation with someone and they say something and it makes you feel a way. Just because it incited emotion doesn't necessarily mean that was their intent. So it's like we can't always react with our feeling. And I think what I'm finding is when people are talking about books, they're talking from a place of feeling and they're leaving out all of the fact. So let's use S.A. Cosby, for example. He wrote King of Ashes. Have you read any of his books? If you like Thriller, if you like that kind of thing, like mystery, phenomenal. I've read all of his books. I have no complaints. Tens across the boards. They are a time. When his latest book was coming out, I saw people online referring to him as a horror author. And I'm like, now I done read all his books and ain't nothing scared me. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not horror, right? So when I was asking people, like, explain to me what you mean. And everybody was saying, like, this scared me. And I'm like, okay, that doesn't make it hard.

Alesia Galati 25:13

Right.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

That's not how genre works. And two things can be true at once. It can be a thriller and it scared you. It can be a mystery and it scared you. That means he's good at style and technique. That means he's doing the due diligence behind the scenes to write a really good book. I'm finding people are like, oh, smut, right? Oh, I read a romance and there was a sex scene, so that means that it was smut. No.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

No.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

Sorry. Do you remember? Have you you've seen the movie The Color Purple before?

Alesia Galati 25:48

I actually have not. You've not seen the color purple. I grew up in a cult. We didn't watch a lot of TV, and I just have not gotten around to it because I feel like it's gonna make me feel a lot of feelings.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

It is gonna make you feel a lot of feelings, right? Now, I will say that I am one of those sick humans. I think there is a vast group of us in the black community that watch the color purple and laugh dark. It gets real dark over here, okay? But there is a scene where Seely is explaining to one of the other characters that she just lets Mr. get on top of her and do her bit do his business, referring to the sex. Which technically is not sex because she was a minor. But anyway, what I like to say to people is just because you are at home letting Mr. get on top of you and do his business doesn't mean that every sex scene is smut. It's spicy to you because what you're doing at home is boring.

unknown 26:44

Sorry.

SPEAKER_02 26:45

You at home letting that man get on top of you and rut. And that's not the rest of us, that's not my fault. That at minimum they be in these books kissing real hard and they be like, oh my god, it was so spicy. Yeah, because you're at home deprived. So anything is spicy to you, girl.

Alesia Galati 27:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:03

Anything is spicy to you.

Alesia Galati 27:04

It's subjective, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:06

But everything I find that trickles down into all genre. Everybody just assumes that whatever their reaction is also going to be the reaction of the masses. I think this is spicy, so everybody is gonna think it's spicy. And then I'd be over here looking like the town whore because I'll be like, what page was the spice on? Did I miss it? Was it here? Did my eyes give out on me and I missed it? I fell asleep while I was reading. Where was it? And it's my book club knows for me an indicator of like legit spice is I'm like, we need to be getting into conversations about kink. It can't just be not that regular Tuesday sex is not spicy. It is, right? It can be, especially when you're dealing with somebody that you're actually attracted to, you're actually in love with. Yes. But on the page, somebody needs to be tied to something. We need to be able to flip a switch and it turns into a red room. There needs to be safe words and things that you're not going to come across in day-to-day life, unless that's the lifestyle you live. So I'm like, this regular Tuesday, like they just everybody was, it made me feel this way. So it is fact.

Alesia Galati 28:17

Right. No, it's so true. And like I think about I had a friend, she sent me a message. She was like, I read the spiciest book I've ever read in my life, and it was, I gotta let me turn around and look at my authors real quick and see which author it was. It was Nikki Payne.

SPEAKER_02 28:33

And I was like, This in the most respectful way possible. I was about to tell your friend to go to hell. Go to hell, girl. The spiciest ever. Define the words we're using.

Alesia Galati 28:46

But I was like, I'm I'm going to assume that you don't read a lot of spice. And she was like, no, I don't. I mostly read like closed door or like fade to black. And I was like, it shows.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

We can tell, friend. We can tell.

Alesia Galati 29:03

It's okay. Love it. But now I know what kind of books not to recommend.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

Exactly. Because as my mother will say, my mother says that Shelby recommends books that'll make your eyeballs sweat. And I'm like, they don't be that bad, but they might. They might.

Alesia Galati 29:19

I love it. They might. But it's so true. Like my husband and I have this thing. It was from a Kevin Hart stand-up where he was like, Me and my wife, I don't even know if he's still married anymore. I don't follow him like that. But like he was like, me and my wife, we have regular, regular sex, and the, like you said, Tuesday sex, and then there's eighth dick. That's different, right? It's right. My husband and I be like, is today eighth or not? I love that. Set the expectation. How's this going? So either the book is eighth dick or it's not. Are we being kinky today? What's going on?

SPEAKER_02 29:54

My friend, he says during the week we can keep stuff, whatever. He likes on the weekend, we turn this bitch into a rev room, like Friday through Sunday. Be prepared. Like I said, people are at the house letting Mr. get on top of them and do his business. And I never thought about that before because that's not my reality.

Alesia Galati 30:18

Yeah. All right. So that was a blast. Let's go ahead and go into you talk about reading for your heart, for your mind. I said heart and mind, mind, and then heart. Yeah. And then for you, coochie. I strongly believe that reading smut can address all of those in some type of way. And I think honestly, I've learned so much about myself and the world that I live in and empathy for other people and have healed things in myself that I was like, oh, that's tender. I didn't, I didn't know that I was still there with a smuddy romance novel. So what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_02 31:04

I originally said that in a YouTube video being funny. As y'all can tell, I just be talking. But it originally stemmed from me wanting to have fun reading. And I wanted to put that emphasis to people that like you can have balance in your reading. You can read the more serious things, you can read things that are lovey-dovey, or you could just read something that's plain old filthy that's gonna make you want to go and repent at whatever religious establishment you attend because the balance is important and all things can be true at once. You don't have to pick in order to be a legit reader. But what that video made me realize is that there are a lot of women that don't have a safe space, women that look like us that don't have a safe space to be sexual, and that there is a lot of trauma attached to their sexual lives for whatever the reasoning may be. Like I had to say to a friend recently, I said, I think the reason that I don't like to be perceived by men is because men have found me attractive since I was nine. I was like, and I don't know that I understood the magnitude of that as a nine-year-old, but as an adult, you don't have to look at me. I would prefer that you don't. So a lot of it is I want them to have a safe space to be able to at least seemingly explore all of these things that we were told that we weren't supposed to do, that we weren't supposed to enjoy, that's not supposed to be fun to us. The other part is I know how healing it's been for me. After a really bad breakup, dating is trash, if anybody wanted to know. So I get my fix through these books, and it's fun. And there are women that look like me that do have multiple boyfriends, or they have two boyfriends and a girlfriend, or they like are. I recently read Don't Run by Sean, and she got to fulfill one of her fantasies by having sex with a man with a pumpkin head on at a Halloween party. Yes, girl. That was a good one, yes, absolutely. Now, again, back to the crazy. Was he stalking her? Yes, but I like to say he's passionate.

Alesia Galati 33:20

He has hobbies.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

That he's passionate and he's a nerd, and we all know nerds are the best kind. Okay, so what? He hacks usually on her computer and stuff, okay? He just is really good at his job and he is passionate about the woman he wants and his hobbies. But it was it's been healing for me because it's shown me all of these possibilities that life hasn't necessarily aligned for me yet, and it still gives me a little bit of hope that it's possible, it's still possible for me, it's still possible for my friends, it's still a thing. So it's it's a bunch of different things, but the most important part is you can have balance, you can be well read and read coochie books. So I read Tony Morrison for fun and then turn around and read some of the filthiest shit that you could possibly think of. And it doesn't, I'm not regressing in any way. I just can do both, girl. But I think what that's tied to, I think why people take reading so seriously, and y'all might not like me for this, and that is okay, because you'll love it here eventually. But I think a lot of y'all don't have personality in real life, and I think the only thing that you do have is that you read a lot of books. So you want those books to be like the hardest and the most important in the whatever the case may be, because you don't know what it's like to just be yourself outside of this particular thing that you do. So I always have to tell people, oh no, people actually like me in real life. And me reading books doesn't add or take away from who I am. I'm still Shelby, I'm still cool, I'm still that girl that survived heart surgery, I'm still a great friend, a great daughter, a great girlfriend, a great whatever. I still meet all of those requirements outside of the books that I read. So if the books were to disappear, I'm still dope as fuck. And I don't think a lot of people can say that about themselves. So it's like they take all of this reading so seriously because they don't have anything else.

Alesia Galati 35:19

Do you think that the pandemic had a lot to do with that? Because we were so separated and we couldn't have hobbies with other people. We couldn't go to pottery classes, we couldn't go do hikes or whatever. Like, I feel like that probably had a big impact on our ability to separate.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

I think it still does. And I don't think people wanted to be as honest with themselves at how bad the pandemic affected us. But even with like me saying dating is bad, I think the dating world is the way that it is currently because I don't think people realize how touch-deprived they are. And I don't think people actually want commitment, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with not wanting commitment. But I think what's happening is people are like, oh, the only way that I can fill this void of needing affection is by getting into relationships with people, and I'm just gonna take whatever I can get because I want the closeness, I want to feel wanted, right? It's those things. So I don't think people are being honest with how much it has impacted us.

Alesia Galati 36:26

Yeah, I have a friend like that where I'm like, leave that man, leave him. She wants to be wanted, she wants to be needed, she just needs always seeking for that external nest. I'm like, are you gonna love yourself?

SPEAKER_02 36:44

Right. I had to be honest, like the last few people, I've had to say to them, like, listen, my life is crazy right now. My life for the past few years has just the baseline is crazy as fuck. So I don't know that I can meet you exactly where you need, but it's gonna be fun for a little while because I want the attention and I'm gonna give it back. It's gonna be you're gonna have a grand time here. But once I'm done, I'm gonna be done. And you got to be done too. You can't cry now, you got to tighten up because once I'm over it, I'm gonna be over it. Okay. And it's like people are always like, You really just said that to me. Yes, because once I want you out my face, I want you out my face immediately. Don't hesitate or nothing. You got to get, but I don't think people are people don't want to be honest, and loving yourself takes work. Who wants to do that work? When I could just the devil you know is easier than the one that you don't. What's gonna come from having to do the work to get to know myself and to love myself into whatever the case may be? Don't nobody love me more than me. It's still a lot of work. It's a lot of work. So I get it. I totally get it. Yeah, but you gotta tell her. Tell her I said, men run like buses. Next 15 minutes, another one is coming. Just get you a new one. Like that Monique meme when she was like, one nigga mess up, get you another nigga. That one mess up, get you another one. And if that one mess up, get you two more. Okay, we read in the book. Get another one. Okay. Yeah. But it's all about balance. Well, multiple things can be true at once. If you don't take nothing else away from me, multiple things can be true at once.

Alesia Galati 38:24

Yeah. So I'm a massive mood reader. I just deleted my TBR again yesterday because that's how I go. So back in early 2025, I deleted my TBR because I was like, I have books on there from 2020 when my algorithm was extremely white, because that's what the algorithm was algorithming. And I am not going to read those books at all. And I have close to a thousand books on this TBR. It's not gonna happen. Right. And so I was like, I usually end up tagging books that I'm like, ooh, these are the tropes that are in this book anyway. Why in the world do I need a TBR when I don't even follow the TBR? So I deleted it.

SPEAKER_01 39:08

Okay.

Alesia Galati 39:09

So I did it again because I was like, why am I waiting for the new year when I could just do it now? Click done. Story graph, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 39:15

Story graph. I love story.

Alesia Galati 39:18

Yes. Same. I cannot always do a book club because of this. The idea of having to like, all right, I have to make myself read a book. And I think that's honestly one of the reasons why I did not read as many books this year is because with the podcast, I was like, oh, I want to interview this person. Let me go ahead and get through some of their backlog. So it was making myself read them. Okay. And my team was like, you haven't talked about a book in a while. And I was like, you're right. Yeah, like I haven't been reading for funsies lately. And that it's not that they're bad books, right? Like I've thoroughly enjoyed the books that I've read, but they're just they're not the ones that I wanted to read in the moment. And so I can't have that hyped out. I'm excited about this.

SPEAKER_02 40:06

So I am also a mood reader. So for my book club, I stick to certain parameters. My goal for my book club is I want to diversify people's reading across black and brown authors. Emphasis on the black. I need to do better with the brown part. I'm ever evolving. So the book club sticks to that. And how I make it fun for myself to pick books is I usually pick themes. Like History Month, I always do a black author. I just pick a decade. For this one, we're doing the Harlem Renaissance, so it'll be Jesse Redmond Fawcett, something that I know that they probably haven't read before. But we did read Harlem Rhapsody in 2025. So it'll be a connecting piece. And then in March, I know my book club well enough. They love Sadiq Johnson. We'll read her new book. So it's like I pick a little theme, but I know I gotta read inside of these parameters, but these are parameters that I genuinely love. So I'm okay. For myself, what I do, because like my podcast, we pick something. I'm lucky to be doing my podcast with someone that reads very similar to me. If one of us throws something out, it's gonna be something that the other likes. Like it's rare that we pick something. I think there was one thing that we tried to read earlier in 2025 that triggered me really badly. And Jess is really good at reeling me back in and being able to say, we just don't have to do it. We're not gonna make you suffer just for the sake of our brand. So that I don't necessarily have to worry about. I don't create TBRs other than that. Like I kind of have to do that. Yeah, like I have a list of things that I'm like, okay, this sounds like it'll be good to talk about with the podcast. I do have a couple of side quests that I do with the podcast throughout the year. So it's if something is coming out and I can't necessarily fit it in the schedule, I'll be like, okay, if anybody has time this month and y'all want to read whatever with me, we'll do a little side quest for it or whatever. Other than that, that gives me space where there are only really two or three books a month that I have to read. Everything else, I'm just flowing through. And I keep the genres like all over the place so that even with the book club, I'm not like stuck anywhere.

Alesia Galati 42:23

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I did for 2025 and I'll do it for 2026, a story graph challenge for mood readers, where like, all right, here's our book club in that here's the trope, you pick the book. And then, like, just the one trope, the one book, as long as it fits in there, I don't care. And then here are 50 recommendations by BIPOC and LGBTQIA plus authors, where you can pick any of these or any that you know of that aren't on my list, and then have fun with it. And I found that that was it was easy to follow, but there were some tropes where I was like, I just don't love this trope. Right. I wonder if I can find one that I actually will enjoy. And so it was almost like a challenge to me of like next year in 2026, we're doing amnesia for one of the months, and I don't like amnesia books at all because I don't think they're realistic. Okay, so I told my husband this, and he had like brain cancer when he was a child and had has like a massive scar on the back of his head because of the surgeries and stuff. He's like, Are you telling me that you don't believe that like someone it's possible that someone could have amnesia because of brain trauma?

SPEAKER_02 43:40

I think I did. I read something that was like amnesia adjacent, but it was like the male main character's fiance dies, and her spirit like ends up in this other girl's body, and that girl is like getting the memories from the dead girl. That's next level. And then he was like, And I didn't necessarily agree with the way that the book was written because it didn't feel like he was in love with the new female main character. It felt like he was in love with his fiance that was now in this girl's body. And I was like, that's not fair. That's not fair. So I understand. But no, I think the other thing that I've had to learn is I don't run my book club like a college course. Like you come into Discord, you hang out. We talk about a little bit of everything. If you only hear because you want coochie book recommendations, there's a channel for that. I got a channel for my babies that like nonfiction. That they read more nonfiction than me. They be in there talking. I'll be like, hey, I don't know what the hell y'all talking about, but there's space for them to be whatever kind of reader they want to be. And if this month's book club pick is not it for you, don't read it. I'm not gonna beat you up about it. What I'm gonna do, come to your house and bully you. I'm not. What I'm gonna do, yell? Okay, and then what? You could just leave the discord. Like, I'm just not that type of person. I don't like those types of environments. The only time I really get strenuous about it, like it was someone I had to remove recently because I was like, you only come in here and complain about your reading, but you never participate in any other way. And that's not the type of environment that I want. Other than that, I'm real chill. Hey, you want to come in? Tell us, okay, you was reading. I have one. He reads a lot of like YA and stuff like that. He comes give us his little updates and we whatever. Okay, cool. He keeps me abreast of the YA stuff because I didn't read YA when I was a YA. Sometimes I don't know. I can't do everything, can't be everywhere. We're super, super lax. So you might pop your head in the Discord. They was laughing at me the other night because I'm in the mood for a high fantasy. So I ordered the will of many, but then I got mad because I was like, I'm probably gonna want to immersive read it because I haven't read a high fantasy in a long time. So just giving myself grace. Couldn't find the audiobook on Liberal FM. I need to figure out my library card situation so that I can be using Libby. Y'all can yell at me about that later. But it's an audible exclusive. So I was in Discord saying cuss words. Yeah. Because I'm like, no, my head he races. And I'm like, and I don't really know how I got there. But it makes sense. It makes sense. I'm like, Amazon is a touchy subject, right? I still have my Kindle unlimited subscription because I'm not abandoning black authors, I'm not abandoning brown authors. I under again, balance, right? Two things can be true at once. But I don't need an Audible subscription just because I want to read this book. Like, why would he make it an exclusive? Like something is not clean in the Kool-Aid. That's what my Discord is like. Me coming in there like, I'm mad.

Alesia Galati 46:51

Honestly, one book a month, especially someone who reads 200-ish a year. I can do one book a month. That's outside of my comfort zone. And that's honestly one of the things I like too about Story Graph is that it has that, like, hey, if you're trying to let's let's read something new, let's read something different. I'm like, leave me alone, go away. Right.

SPEAKER_02 47:09

Don't hold me accountable.

Alesia Galati 47:13

But sometimes we need other people to hold us accountable. And I think that it allows us to diversify our reads, to read outside of our lived experiences and read things that also can show us things about ourselves. There's so much that we can learn from reading outside of our typical enjoy our comfort reads and all that stuff. So you have your YouTube, you've got your book club, you've got your podcast. How are you setting boundaries? Because there's this like celebrity effect that happens with being content creators, being, especially being podcasters. I don't know what this phenomenon is, but you're in someone's ear as they're doing their everyday tasks, as they're driving to and from work. You're maybe on the TV with your YouTube channel while they're cooking dinner. And so they feel like they know you. Right. How do you set some boundaries with all that, especially having a more personalized community with Discord?

SPEAKER_02 48:12

I one have set boundaries with myself on what I will share and when I will share it. So with my mom and her health journey with breast cancer, that's something that we agreed upon sharing. But I have told myself, like, I'm not just gonna sit on the internet and cry because that's not like me. So that's important. Set boundaries with yourself. What are you okay with sharing? What are you not okay with sharing? So I'll talk about coochie books all day. Y'all will never know what my actual sex life is like. And if I even put something on the internet referencing a man or sex, please know that it's probably never about me personally. I just think it's funny or whatever, it matches a song, whatever. It's net, I just have those boundaries, right? The other thing that I try to instill in the people that follow me, I usually refer to them as my cousins, and I have a thing where I tell everybody that I love them because that's something that my parents instilled in me. You don't leave the house, you don't get off the phone without saying goodbye, and I love you. That's just how we are. So it's how I in my YouTube videos usually I always say it. And I do that because I genuinely do care about humanity. I care about humans, but and also y'all only know what I tell y'all. So I always remind them that y'all only know what I tell y'all. And half of what I tell you, I'm telling you weeks after whatever transpired. Like when I had open heart surgery, Alicia, I promise you, they thought I was absolutely insane because they were like, We never knew you were sick. And I was like, that was the point. You weren't supposed to. Yeah. The people that needed to know knew. And they were like, Yeah, your energy did seem a little low, and this and that, and blah blah blah. I'm like, maybe. But there were people in my family that my mom was calling, like, Shelby has to have surgery. And they were like, What the fuck are you talking about? We just saw y'all a couple weeks ago. What are you saying? So it's set those boundaries first, but we are normal people. There was a funny story. There was a woman that did come up to me crying one day. So my mom is popular in the yarn community. We go to this event every January that's in New York City in the Marriott Marquee. It's called Vogue knitting live. It's think comic-com, but yarn, right? And people can do all sorts of different things with yarn. It's not just, oh, your granny's sitting there making a sweater. They felt like all sorts of things. And a friend of ours that has become family, she has a yarn company where she hand dyes yarn. So I'm working in her booth. And I like to consider myself yarn adjacent. I don't do the yarn things. I just know there's my mama, there's people that do yarn, and then directly next to them is me. Um, so she's looking at these two skeins of yarn, and she's like, if I buy one of these, what can I make? And I said, a hat. And she said, if I buy two, I said, then you can have two hats, baby. I don't know. I just, I'm just here with the money, okay? And she laughed, and I'm going to get her a bag, and I turn around, and I when I say hysterically crying, so now okay, neurodivergent here, okay. Little touch of tism. My mom was too prideful to get her baby checked. I'm staring at this woman, I was like, your face is leaking. What is that? And she's like, you and your mom are so motivational. I was like, baby, I be at the house talking to my camera. I'm so glad hey, you got all of this from that. But I just be talking to my camera. And I think that has leveled people out so that they understand I'm just like you. I just happen to get on the internet and talk about my books. And some people happen to recognize me. But I'm a normal person. That's all.

Alesia Galati 51:55

And I love that what you said about like when you're creating boundaries, doing it with yourself first and like making that decision, that conscious decision, how much am I going to share? How much do I feel comfortable sharing? And as a chronic oversharer, like I have to set those boundaries with myself and be like, we can talk about it live, but it's gonna get deleted later. Yeah. And that's okay.

SPEAKER_02 52:19

Exactly. Because it's I get like weird when I feel like people are overly familiar with me, like it makes me uncomfortable. And that's totally something I should probably talk about in therapy, right? Because it's probably attached to something. But once I started to notice that in myself, I had to say, okay, I can preempt that by what I decide to share, by what I not decide to share. But I also think I'm just one of those people, like I make everybody comfortable, and I don't mean to. If it were up to me, I'd hide under, I'd stand in a corner, don't see me. Like, I just people watch, maybe pull my Kindle out every once in a while, read my little book, whatever. But people are drawn to me, and that's for a reason that's beyond us. So it's like I've stopped trying to mitigate that, and like I just go with it, but I can control me. So yeah, that's the that'll do the trick.

Alesia Galati 53:14

Thank you so much for that. Everybody go check out everything that Shelby's doing. Where can people find you? Hang out with you, join your stuff and all that, and we'll have links in the show notes and the YouTube description for anyone doing other things too.

SPEAKER_02 53:29

On Instagram, I'm Shelby Monet, and everywhere else I am Shelby in the book club. Come hang out. We read books, we talk about all sorts of things, and they say I'm funny sometimes, so you'll love it here.

Alesia Galati 53:43

All those links in the show notes. Everybody go check Shelby out. You will love her content, it is fantastic. So definitely go check that out. Shelby, thank you so much for being on. This has been so much fun.

SPEAKER_02 53:54

Thank you for having me.