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The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading

About the Book

The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading

Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the “real ground of literature,” she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES.

The shelf has everything Rose could wish for --- a classic she has not read, a remarkable variety of authors, and a range of literary styles. The early 19th-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 those about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels abut a picaresque novel from the 17th century. There are several novels by a wonderful, funny, contemporary novelist who has turned to raising dogs because of the tepid response to her work.

In THE SHELF, Rose investigates the books on her shelf with exuberance, candor and wit while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf --- those texts that accompany us through life. “Fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels,” she sustains a sense of excitement as she creates a refreshingly original and generous portrait of the literary enterprise.

The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading
by Phyllis Rose

  • Publication Date: May 19, 2015
  • Genres: Essays, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • ISBN-10: 0374535361
  • ISBN-13: 9780374535360