The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment -- to systematically read her way through a random shelf of books in the library, LEQ-LES, "fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels." An original take on literary taste and habits by the acclaimed author of Parallel Lives.
Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature." Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it.
What results is a spirited experiment in "Off-Road or Extreme Reading." Rose's shelf of roughly thirty books has everything she could wish for—a remarkable variety of authors and a range of literary ambitions and styles. The early-nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside tales about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels about a novel from an Afrikaans writer who fascinates Rose to the extent that she ends up watching a YouTube video of his funeral.
A joyous testament to the thrill of engagement with books high and low, The Shelf leaves us with the feeling that there are treasures to be found on every library or bookstore shelf. Rose investigates her own discoveries with exuberance, candor, and while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf.
“Exhilarating, adventurous, original--Phyllis Rose's The Shelf is a reminder of what reading and writing are all about.” -- Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The premise is simple: Rose (A Woman of Letters) picked one shelf in the New York Society Library to read and review. After establishing a few rules a reasonably equal number of male and female authors, for example Rose decided on the LEQ to LES shelf and began to read, with titles including: the obscure novellas of Austrian writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Rhonda Lerman's feminist romp Call Me Ishtar, and Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. The reviews here aren't especially concerned with persuading people to read the books. Instead, Rose uses the texts and her research about their authors as a jumping-off point to talk about literature as a whole. An entire chapter goes by without introducing a new book from the shelf as Rose processes her thoughts about women writers and privilege in fiction. Ultimately, Rose explores how books reach readers. Literary merit, she argues, comes not from the praise of reviewers or critics but from "qualities that would allow a good reader to read it more than once with pleasure." The "common reader" of book clubs and Amazon reviews has as much right to judge as traditional gatekeepers. Rose's experiment provides specific case studies to use in weighing the age-old question: which books are worth keeping? For skeptics of the canon, this book will make the cut. Illus.
