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"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. 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 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 those about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels abut a picaresque novel from the seventeenth 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"--
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Add another title to my list of favorite Books About Books. Phyllis Rose (almost) randomly selects a shelf in her library with the goal of reading (almost) every book on it. Thankfully, she doesn't choose a completely random shelf; wouldn't it be awful if she chose a shelf composed of a single, terrible author?! Thankfully, she doesn't assign herself to read every book on the shelf; wouldn't it be awful if she had to read every book of an author rather than choosing a sizable sample?!
Her experiment is a nice combination of randomness and choice and all ends well. Rose drifts where the books take her and continues off the path each time, taking us, her readers, on a lovely walk through book countries few of us have ever and will never visit. Yes, a great read for those of us who love Books About Books.