The Shelf (From LEQ to LES) [SHELF]

by Phyllis Rose

The Shelf( From LEQ to LES) <> Hardcover <> PhyllisRose <> FarrarStrausGiroux

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Memoir, Literary Criticism, Writing, Essays, Adult

Hardcover

First published May 13, 2014

About the author

Phyllis Rose is an American literary critic, essayist, biographer, and educator.

She lives in Connecticut with her husband, writer and illustrator Laurent de Brunhoff

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

"our young dzhigits are strapping, and their caftans are covered in silver"

The subtitle “Adventures in Extreme Reading” is a leetle bit of an overstatement. Truly extreme reading would be completing all of Marcel Proust whilst in a bathysphere suspended in the Mariana Trench (north of Papua New Guinea) eight miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean and living entirely on a diet of raw cabbage and crème de menthe and the whole thing broadcast live on a dedicated tv channel. .

But I am quibbling. This is such a nice book. I love it when people set themselves rigorous challenges and then stick to them. There are a few music blogs I follow, for instance Popular (http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular) where gradually every British number one record is being eruditely reviewed & analysed; and My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection (http://alltherecords.tumblr.com/) which speaks for itself and is a lot of fun. In novel reading, some people dedicate themselves to reading all of the 1001 Books You Have To Read Before Dawn Or You Will Die, Ha Ha Ha. Phyllis Rose’s self-challenge was the OPPOSITE of the 1001 books challenge. The point of it – to read through a whole shelf of books at her local Manhattan library – was to avoid all the mediation which usually comes between the book and the reader. These books were chosen by the alphabet, not by reviewers or awards committees or critics or friends, the usual way books come to us. Phyllis calls it “off-road reading”. I love the idea. However…..

THERE’S A GIANT FLAW

which Phyllis herself reveals apparently unwittingly (but how could that be, Phyllis is the most witting of companions). It is this : how did the books get on to the library shelves? All is revealed on p 138, in my favourite chapter, all about space in libraries, no, not science fiction Space but that very vital kind of space, shelf space, which keeps librarians waking up in the night with a shriek as they have another dream about coming to the end of their shelf space and falling falling falling with all their friends and family and pets into the abyss of infinite forgetting.
So in a library there is a head of acquisitions, and a team of jolly helpers, and they sift through all the reviews & critics &NYRB and all of those things. They also respond to reader requests – if a book is requested by 3 people, they’ll get it. (Hint – you and two friends can totally rule your library acquisitions, but you’ll probably need to change your identities every 9 months or so).

Boosted by reviews, prizes, large sales, word of mouth, or personal recommendations, a novel may make its way on to the library shelf

Says Phyllis. So... there are all the same “mediators” who she was trying to avoid by this systems-based reading, but they are one step removed.

LOOKING OUT OF MANY PAIRS OF EYES

And so it begins, in South Africa, arbitrarily (One for the Road by Etienne Leroux), then into the Caucasus (A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov), to Paris for The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, off to Quebec for The Habitant-Merchant by James LeRossignol…. It’s a time-travelling travelogue, The Shelf is The Tardis, Phyllis is Doctor Who – but, unless you stick rigidly to one kind of book or a teeny group of writers, that’s what novel reading is for all of us; & so The Shelf reflects back to us the Joy of Fiction, and Why We Do It.

LIKE A PERFECT CONVERSATION

All manner of great stuff is uncovered as Phyllis the Hungry Caterpillar eats her way through The Shelf. Many questions come bounding towards us – including -

How accurate should a translation be? (Nabokov translated A Hero of Our Times, and he thought Lermontov’s prose was dreadful, full of hackneyed phrases, so he rendered it into hackneyed English; in fact he beat up Lermontov’s novel so badly in his multitudinous finger wagging and censorious footnotes, that Phyllis had to immediately read another translation to get Vlad out of her brain)

Every reading of a book is the creation of a new book. Every reading is a misreading.

Why did this author suddenly stop publishing? (This was Rhoda Lerman – Phyllis tracked her down & found she was fully devoted to running a breeding kennel for Newfies (Newfoundland dogs) and had become a New Ager; and this was also Lisa Lerner, who published Just Like Beauty in 2002 which PR loved and then nothing – again, PR tracks her down (it’s easy with the internet) and finds out – Lisa says “I never intended to write a novel, I was a performance artist” – and now she’s a scriptwriter, because there’s maybe some actual money in that)

How much damage does a bad review do? (PB looks at his shoes and mumbles “aw, hardly any”)

Followed by : what are online amateur reviewers doing to books? (GR doesn’t get a mention but she has great fun with one Amazon reviewer who five-starred God’s Ear by Rhoda Lerman and also reviews shoes:

I hate to say it but this shoe is dreadful… I put them on and within moments there were painful pressure points on my feet. I took off the shoes and my feet had red marks where the pressure areas were literally ‘killing’ me

(What can we say to this poor Amazon reviewer? That she should have tried a larger size? That she also doesn’t know what literally means? )

and, our final question,

What is CREW and MUSTIE? (well, those deserve a paragraph unto themselves)

THE DARK SIDE OF LIBRARIES : CREW AND MUSTIE

CREW = Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, yeah, that’s right, throwing out books!

MUSTIE is how you decide if a book should be crewed.

M = misleading (more relevant to scientific books, but I would certainly class all novels by Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade as misleading about various important issues)

U = Ugly! I.e. this book is worn out!

S = superseded (there is a new better edition we should buy)

T = Trivial (this one is controversial; one person’s Spot the Dog is another person’s superstring theory

I = Irrelevant (to the needs to the community the library serves)

E = Elsewhere, as in, can this be found elsewhere, such as on the web, in the Gutenberg Project, etc
According to Phyllis, this is how those librarians roll. Terrifying.

JODI PICOULT

Well, she wasn’t on The Shelf but Phyllis keeps running into her, as it were, for one reason or another, and figures she should read at least one of her novels, so she looks up the interview with Ellen DeGeneres on youtube and reports back :

In her mid-forties, she wears her long reddish hair unstyled, in loose curls. She has a pretty face and makes a lovely impression although (or perhaps because) she is slightly overweight and not especially well-dressed. She is totally comfortable on television and speaks in contemporary uptalk.

I was not au fait with that expression, but helpfully Phyllis illustrates the Jodi style of speech:

I worked on Wall Street? But the stock market crashed? That was probably a good thing for me?

So that’s contemporary uptalk. May it die screaming.

IF YOU LIKE THIS THEN YOU’LL LIKE THAT

I could go on and on, this was a completely delightful book which I recommend to all of you lovely people. Every person on this site will enjoy this book! Guaranteed!

(I may mention that there is another less well known book-about-books, called Reading with Oprah, by Kathleen Rooney – if you love The Shelf you’ll love that one too. It’s another system-based reading challenge – Kathleen reads all of Oprah’s book choices and contemplates wittily what her famous book club has done to America – Highly recommended too!)

AND NOW

Back to my own personal Shelf, and some reinvigorated munching.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think picking and reading a whole shelf of library books, would make a wonderful challenge, one I may adopt somewhere down the line. Of course picking the shelf is not as easy as it appears, because many shelves are full of a popular authors book, so it does take a bit of work to find just the right shelf.

Besides reading and evaluating, critiquing the book, she often looked up information on the author and in some cases actually contacted them. I loved reading the background of the book and the author, also many times Rose included what was going on in the country that the author lived in. Gave the reader a very well rounded look at the many things that can and often do effect the writing of the book.

There is a part, which I really enjoyed, about a New York library and how they choose the books to buy and chooses the books to weed from the collection. Also what it takes for a book to become a classic, how books are chosen in school and many other interesting tidbits from the book world.

A read to sink into and enjoy, all things books, authors and readers alike.

[Gwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is perfect for a librarian who reads books the way many people watch TV. Rose goes through a shelf of the fiction section at a library, reading all the authors there. She shares her thoughts with us, as well as biographical and historical information, contemporary reviews, translators' comments, and much more. She contacts some of the authors, editors, and even cover designers to find out about their experiences. Of course not all the books are great, but she makes it worth reading about even the mediocre and the bad. I liked it so much that I'm torn between passing it on to another reader and keeping it to guide my reading of the best books on her shelf. I even read all the footnotes after finishing the main text.

It doesn't hurt that she presents a sympathetic and understanding picture of the library collection development and weeding process.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the least interesting and silliest question authors are asked to consider during a certain sort of quick interview (e.g., for Powell's Books Q&A) has to do with what books are on the shelf next to theirs in a library or bookshop. It's meaningless. So I was pleased to discover that Phyllis Rose chose the LEQ-LES shelf for more-or-less arbitrary reasons. Her point was to choose a random shelf and read her way through it. She actually dislikes most of the books.

Like me she seems to prefer reading on a e-reader even when she has the physical book at hand - physical book purists need to know this: it's all about the lighting and font size! But one of the actual library books she read for the project she mishandled so much - threw it on the floor roughly every night - that it needed to be repaired after she returned it (Phyllis, no).

Most interesting were her general ideas on the life of reading, and reading tastes, and how literary reputation is created, destroyed, or never takes off.

Rose is dismayed that five books at the end of her shelf are by John Lescroart, a popular author of detective novels (his books go on to fill the following shelf, too). She gives him his due and describes a few things she appreciated about his work, but then realizes that what she liked - his background research into the topic of each novel (e.g., military contractors in Iraq for one novel) isn't what most of his fans read for. She feels a growing boredom after getting through a couple Lescroarts and then asserts:

This is what I've learned: if you don't like the characters, and there isn't a compelling narrative (what I would call plot), and you're resistant to the puzzle-solving element in mystery novels, then you have to be reading for the direct contact with the writer that is the quality Geoff Dyer talked about. But that quality, "voice," is the hardest thing to achieve in literature. It requires that a writer fight against every sentence, resisting the pressure of convention and conformity, resisting his or her own impulses toward banality and the easy way. Unsurprisingly, not many writers do this. They just shuffle around the same old words, the same old ways of thinking, into a semblance of something new: new information, new settings, a new kind of detective. Most genre writers choose to write genre fiction because will, determination, and very hard work are enough to see them through. Although some writers achieve it, authenticity is not required. (page 211-12)

People will always read series-mysteries or other genre fiction, so there's absolutely no risk that opinions like hers will threaten those writers or readers. But it gives me something to think about (and reminds me that it's time to re-read a favorite of mine: Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage.)

[Kerfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Shelf" is about the pleasures of reading.

It is also an example of itself--I would never have known about it/read it if I hadn't seen it on a shelf in the library, pulled it out to see if I might want to read it, and then taken it out.

Phyllis Rose picks a random shelf at the library (well not entirely--she has some rules) and reads all the books on it, books that mostly she would never have even considered reading otherwise.

I thought I would enjoy her journey and I did. She even gets to know personally some of the authors, and to know at least something about the others. She discovers a few gems, and grows to appreciate nearly all the stories and their writers in some way. As Rose questions her own habits, you being to ask yourself: how do I read?

Mostly "The Shelf" is an affirmation of the need for browsing through actual shelves of books in an increasingly digital world. "If you liked x, you'll like y" is a way to narrow, not broaden, your point of view: who wants to just confirm what you already know all the time? Oh, ok, I guess a lot of people do. But if we want to open ourselves to the new, the uncomfortable, the exciting and strange, we need to be willing to look beyond the curated life. We need to take chances on not only what we don't know, but what we haven't even considered. The library continues to tempt me with covers and titles, and I continue to be surprised by where it leads me.

From her remarks about the different books and authors, I suspect our tastes are quite different. So I wouldn't use her particular experience as a jumping-off point, but I love the spirit of it, and of course it's tempting to try a mini-shelf somewhere of your own.

I was also surprised she kept going to Amazon, rather than Goodreads, for "crowd-sourced" reviews. Could she not know Goodreads? OK, Amazon owns it now, but the reviews still seem more the work of passionate readers--they may even have borrowed a book from the library--rather than passionate consumers. Hopefully someone will tell her about it; I think it would appeal to her in the way "The Shelf" appealed to me.

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Shelf, literary critic Phyllis Rose is on a somewhat ridiculous enterprise -- she wants to read her way through a random shelf of her library's fiction section. She makes it slightly less outlandish by setting a few rules about the contents of the shelf she eventually settles on -- it has to include at least one classic that she wants to read and hasn't yet, there have to be several women authors, and if there is a run of works by the same author, she only has to read three of them.

Still, it's a pretty arbitrary collection of books, ranging across a couple of centuries, world views, topics, and literary styles. If faced with that particular shelf of books, I would admit defeat and move on. Phyllis Rose is made of sterner stuff, and plugs away at the shelf, proving that what the reader brings to the book is at least as important as what the author contributed. She finds something of interest and even of value in practically every book, no matter how poorly written, or bizarre, or just boring.

Even more remarkable, she can take these books, of varying quality and interest, and converse about them, in a very entertaining way. In fact, this is exactly the sort of book that would have been a good blog. But as a book, it's excellent. Rose is constantly curious about the books she's reading, so she researches the authors, sometimes contacting them if she has a burning question about something. She makes her way through three or four different translations of the Lermontov book she tackled, and talks about the differences. She also contacted the book designer of one of the editions, which was unexpectedly revealing.

Rose, with her background in academia, literary publications, and the publishing world, has a lot of insights to divulge, and uses the project as an excuse to find out even more. Her discovery of exactly how libraries decide which books to weed out when space is a problem was quite interesting.

Five stars without question. It's the sort of book I couldn't stop sharing as I read it and it started several good discussions along the way.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

As many of my reviews proclaim, this particular book has been one I've wanted to read for years. I have had no luck tracking down Phyllis Rose's The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading in three local library systems, and have never seen a copy in a new bookshop, so I decided to purchase a relatively inexpensive secondhand copy to settle down with - at last.

Rose has written a lot of non-fiction titles which interest me, and she also edits the Norton Book of Women's Lives. Her reading career, she tells us early on, has been spent chasing tomes from different syllabuses. Here, however, she decided to embark on a project which was a little different, deciding to 'read like an explorer'. She chose the New York Society Library, of which she is a member, and selected a shelf of fiction - authors LEQ to LES - which met her rather strict guidelines. She then read her way through it, in no particular order as she wished to give herself 'complete freedom'. The Shelf details her experience.

Rose wanted to steer a course away from the usual ways in which readers find their next books; her intention here was to 'read my way into the unknown - into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no bestseller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me.' She goes on to say: 'Let me, I thought, if only for a change, choose my reading almost blindly. Who knows what I will find?'

The guidelines which Rose set herself made it relatively difficult to locate a single shelf from which to read. She perused almost 200 of them before she found one which fit her criteria. On reflection, she notes: 'Visually, the shelf I had focused on was a pleasing mix of old-style bindings, gold-stamped library-bound hardcovers, and modern books whose colorful jackets were wrapped in Mylar.'

As one would expect, what Rose found from her shelf was incredibly varied in topic and author. She selected her shelf based on a classic which she had never read but wanted to - Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. Her project introduced her to books about French Canadian farmers, upper-class Austrians, and detectives working in California.

Rose reflects: 'The first thing I learned from my experiment - aside from the weakness of my will or, by the same token, the strength of my impulse toward enjoyment - was that in the age of the Internet, it is very hard to stick with a book without consulting an outside source. Reading is more centrifugal than it used to be.' She also notes that prefaces can irrevocably alter the reading experience; specifically for her, this revolves around Vladimir Nabokov's introduction to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, which robbed her of any excitement, and added diverting, and sometimes unnecessary, comments to the reading experience.

One of the most interesting elements of The Shelf, aside from the general idea behind it, are the varied differences which Rose writes about between differing translations of the same book. During her project, she came to three versions of A Hero of Our Time, one of which she did not enjoy, and one of which thrilled her. Throughout, Rose wonders about and researches the authors and books on her shelf, many of which are new to her. She even strikes up a couple of friendships with contemporary women authors.

I really like the central idea in The Shelf, and it is one which I would love to personally replicate - although with only a local library branch at my disposal, I'm not sure I would come across an entire shelf which fully interested me. The chances of reading mainly bestsellers and popular fiction in a local library setting would, of course, be far higher than Rose encountered in her private library, which has been in existence in New York since 1754. Regardless, The Shelf was an incredibly enjoyable, and rather fresh experiment, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Rose's crisp prose, and the curiosity which she displays at all times, balanced the whole wonderfully.

[Dillwynia Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The father of a school friend of mine was a speed reader. Each week, his wife would go down to the library and take 7 books off the shelf from the point where she had been the previous week. The man knew within 3 pages if he had read the book or not, and would drop that one and start another. All the while he would be watching TV (particularly current affairs) and holding a conversation. He could also quote bits back at you just in case you thought he wasn’t concentrating. I liked his method so I started from Aa in fiction and managed to read through 2 shelves before I knew that I would die long before I read authors like Trollope and so stopped. That was my experiment.

Phyllis Rose conducted her own experiment: read everything off a particular shelf from the New York Society Library. Now, there were a series of rules that she tried to abide by. She didn’t want to trapped reading an author that dominated the shelf; she wanted to have it contain at least one classic she hadn’t read, but desired to do; and a few other rules that had to be discarded. It took some effort, but she found a shelf that interested her: LEQ to LES.

What follows is a series of essays of her adventure. What really happens, of course, is a journey into reading habits, authors and genres. Reading a random book off a shelf opens thoughts that are not as likely to happen as when you take – say - a known author such as Agatha Christie. Reading books in genres you don’t usually favour also expands your horizons. It is important that Rose doesn’t baulk at reading genres she doesn’t like. All she did do is stop long before she came to the end of the author’s body of work. I enjoyed her honesty about her tastes and often looking at the literary merit over personal taste.

Reading these diverse books encouraged Rose to seek out the writers – both living & dead. For those obscure ones she searched out biographical notes in various reference books and literary journals of the day for the critics reactions. Others, she hunted down and hoped to do interviewed – a few would become personal friends.

Some of her responses to the books and genres generated essays on diverse topics such as feminism, topical & important events at time of a book’s publication, and about curating and running a library. Her research skills and commentary had me also scouring Wikipedia and other rabbit holes, which made me very happy.

The unread classic was A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov. The library has numerous editions by different translators. This means Rose was able to compare how different translators interpret the original text. Surprisingly, the Nabokov translation is the one she kinds most intrusive regarding a translator putting their voice over that of the author’s. This leads to a discussion of how far can a translator go in leaving their stamp before they actually change the style/ tone of the original author’s and make it not their book. I enjoyed this discussion as it is important we, the reader, are mindful of how much the nuances are lost or changed when dealing with translated books.

A great series of essays about a reading adventure. I felt that it showed that readers need to be catholic and liberal with their reading. Next time – pull a book off a shelf from an author or genre you have never tried before and have a go. You may discover a new world, or you may hate it, but like fussy eaters that miss taste experiences, saying: “I don’t like that” is a sure way of narrowing your life experiences.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started off poorly. The conceit is that Rose randomly chose a shelf at the new york Society Library to read (LEQ to LES). Most people on Goodreads, and most people I know in real life, choose what they'll next read in a random way, so it's not as eye-popping a move as she believes. As a friend put it, "sounds like an academic slumming." If she had chosen that letter combination as an Oulipian constraint (and she does mention Oulipo) the book would have a better foundation.

But Shelf gets better as the first chapter recedes, and thanks to Rose I'm now aware of the writers Rhoda Lerman (u.s.) and Alexander Lornet-Holenia (austria). This is far more than I got from Amis' and Gaitskill's collections of reviews. (Amis seemed resentful that other people wrote books and Gaitskill didn't have much tangible enthusiasm for the writers she liked.) I question the inclusion of a chapter on how libraries weed out books as Rose could have read spent those pages on more books by the authors on her shelf and not limited herself to 3 titles per (if they wrote that many). Some of her prose choices may grate, but on the whole her style matches her project.

[Diane Challenor · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting book, particularly if you love books about books (literary criticism). I enjoyed Phyllis Rose's writing style, which made the book enjoyable and easy to read. I envied the author's reading muscle. She worked her way through a group of authors I'd never heard of, and I will probably never read, and she made the journey intriguing and fun. I heard about her book when Simon, of the Tea or Books Podcast, quickly mentioned it while talking about something else. I dived into Amazon and bought it, and started reading it immediately. It became my "breakfast-read", every morning I'd read a chapter. If you like books about books, I'm sure you'll very likely think this book is a gem.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calling all book nerds! What a great read - Rose picks a shelf at the New York Society Library and works her way through it. Lovely essays about books, libraries,writers and fiction. My kind of read for sure.

[Ally · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't read this book. I'm not entirely sure why I finished it. I'm the kind of person who actually does like reading about people reading (my spouse thought this was bonkers). Maybe I went in with the wrong expectations, which I realize now were for a quirky millennial to have written this about wacky books she read and maybe some personal growth she experienced or ways she could relate the literature to her life. Instead, it was an author who was so convinced that she was worth listening to that she barely had to put any of herself into this book. In fact, she spent way too much time contacting authors and even designers of a novel's cover art (maybe I'm too much in the school of authorial trespassing). Why was I listening to her recite the author's biography? It's like she ran out of things to say and so filled it with useless information. I get the instinct to look up an author while or after reading the novel, but why would you publish a book of that? Probably the worst thing I could say about this book is that I don't want to read a single one of the books that she wrote about. She lost credibility for me when she gave high praise to "Super Sad Love Story" and its author (empty clever crap), but she also just didn't make any of the books sound interesting. Even the ones she loved. The best thing I can say about it was that some of her pontificating on how we pick books, women's literature, and detective novels as a genre was mildly interesting.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one caught my eye a long time ago and I've been thinking about it ever since. I like the idea of reading a shelf in the library. (Phyllis Rose looks around and says, "I wonder if I could read every book in the library" and then realizes that she's not going to do that.) Rose likes her idea of reading a shelf curated by the alphabet, time, and librarians, the idea that she is going to read things she never would have read, that aren't nominees for the Booker Prize or books her friends liked. She chooses a shelf with a "classic," A Hero of Our Time, my favorite book in college. I was worried when she got her hands on the terrible Nabokov translation but she picks up on its badness right away, with all the footnotes he stuck into the first sentence. Rose knows a Harold Bloom theory that all authors have an Oedipal complex about the work they are inspired by. This is nonsense, but Nabokov is translating Lermontov in order to kill him and have sex with his mother. Rose's shelf also contains the dry-ass Foote translation, which makes no impact. Then she tracks down the best, Marian Schwartz, translation with sunglasses guy on the cover. I loved it. Rose's copy had a confused undergrad making notes in the margins, mostly about how the narrator is disparaging Circassians. Rose says, "For her, a novel is an exercise in spotting bias, and she is good at it." Rose actually tracks down the woman who did the cover design with the cool guy and ascertains how it came about. Turns out, that Modern Library designer didn't read the book but somehow truly captured its core. This is what I'm here for.

Gaston Leroux is next. Turns out, The Phantom of the Opera as a novel has good bones but also a bonkers backstory and two thirds of it is men unravelling the mystery after the phantom has buggered off. Rose does a deep read, and a deep watch, of all that is Phantom and Phantom-inspired and appreciates the way that an art becomes a newer art. Then she makes a new friend. This is her first of two new author friends. Rhoda Lerner wrote two hilarious Jewish novels, one novel of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, and one gooey medieval-philosophical piece, and then she pivoted hard into Newfoundland puppies. Rose develops her own theory of Lerner, but when she contacts her, she learns that the truth is sloppier. Eventually, she learns to appreciate the breeding of Newfies. Her other new author friend wrote something so shocking but so captivating, and there's a review that refuses to understand inherent feminism, and then she finds out that the author went into screenwriting because it's more lucrative. And they're buds now.

The old books. The classics. A kind story about Quebecois shopkeepers. And I think I need to read Gil Blas. It sounds like a banger. The Shelf is a book to be savored. It's hilarious, it's thoughtful, it's well-researched. I love it purely and I might have to come back to it someday. Do read.

[Ruthiella · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I wonder if, at some point, all readers have the desire that I had then to consume everything in the library, but it is a desire no sooner formulated than felt to be impossible. ”

“More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it’s just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for and then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.”

This was exactly the kind of book about reading that I like. I didn’t get any unnecessary detail about Phyllis Rose’s personal life. She talks about the books she read and explains why she liked or didn't like them. The tangents she did explore were interesting to me: Nabokov’s relationship to and opinions on other writers; biographical detail about the authors themselves; how books arrive and leave library shelves; the struggles of women authors; etc. I found it delightful and fascinating.

[Kazen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fear not, this is not a stunt memoir. Rose does read through a shelf at the library but it's not as extreme as the title suggests as there's no time limit, no angst when titles on the shelf change, and no diatribe about doing things right or wrong. The shelf is a device, a way to hang interesting conversations about reading and the literary world together.

I like what she has to say. While choosing a shelf she talks about how most of us have our reading chosen for us, be it by teachers and bestseller lists or award panels and librarians. The fact that only three of the eleven writers on the shelf are women opens my favorite chapter about women and fiction. She delves into how libraries decide what to keep and what to toss, and how opinions of books change (or not) over time and distance. If you are a bookish person (I'm going to guess you are) Rose is speaking to you.

Refreshingly she doesn't put down particular ways of reading. Physical books are fine, but the text can be too small and the pages can crumble as you turn them, interfering with your enjoyment.

The ideal of translation as a pane of glass becomes embodied when you read on a Kindle or a Nook. Nothing comes between you and the text, certainly no object remind you distressingly of age and decay.

All of us who are unable to read physical books (audiobooks for the win) or have something going on that makes it a painful proposition (like my sad wrists) wholeheartedly agree.

Wide-ranging and packed with insight, The Shelf is a welcome addition to any "books about books" shelf.

[del · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the premise of the author's experiment and expected it to be a sort of extended literary personal essay. it was actually more of a structured collection of literary criticism (while simultaneously sort of being a commentary about being wary of literary criticism) interspersed with personal anecdotes and observations from the author as she writes about her experience of the project The literary criticism is much stronger than the memoir-style aspect of the book, which feels a little bland. But there are some chapters and passages I really enjoyed, and they were everything I wanted out of a book like this. The chapter on women and fiction is wonderful, as is the chapter about library weeding criteria. Some very interesting thoughts about what makes a book "important", and in the end she ties the whole experiment up with a pro-library message, encouraging readers to occasionally ignore the "gatekeepers" of literature (reviewers, critics, school curriculum, etc.) and explore the stacks on their own.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Not every moment, but there were entire chapters that I wanted to read aloud to my friends, my school colleagues, my students. I know that Phyllis Rose is an amazing writer. Parallel Lives is one of my favorite books ever. This book is I think what is meant by a "tour de force." Rose sets up these rules for herself: a library shelf, not more that five books by one author, no books I've already read (or is it authors?) I'll read no more than three books by one author. And write about the experience. Seems sort of random, right. But it is glorious. It's about why anyone reads, and what the delights of reading are, and how the internet enables us to find the authors of these books and connect with them, or the history of the books...and in the case of "The Phantom of the Opera," the play and musical that ensue. If you love reading, this book is your box of chocolate, your delicious escape. I have marked two entire chapters and twenty more pages I need to copy. I need to buy this book for my friends. Phyllis Rose is brilliant. I want to be her friend.

[Ashok Rao · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. Phyllis Rose proves that reading is indeed an adventure. To begin with she asks the reader a simple question: What about all those books that are never read at all, never even considered? Who speaks for them? Will they sink back into the abyss of unread literature? And how certain works of fiction live forever without actually being read. She compares the 758-page bulk of Gil Bias to eating potato chips. Each little bit is so satisfying, you want just another. I am dying to read this book. Her curiosity in wanting to more about the author of the book she is reading makes this book an interesting read.

[Laila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ehrmagerd, I'm such a (book)nerd!

I loved this book, plain and simple.

Books about books are SO in my wheelhouse. In fact, my wheelhouse is partially *constructed* out of books about books.

Phyllis Rose is a generous, enthusiastic, adventurous reader. She chose one shelf out of the New York Society Library (LEQ-LES) and read her way through the shelf. Her observations are warm, witty, and illuminating.

A longer review to come on HTTP://bigreadlinglife.wordpress.com!

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off wonderfully with a lot of questions about what makes the canon and why but got bogged down when the author described the plots of each novel. Enjoyed her feminist ranting and intelligent commentary on literary criticism - just could have been a good essay rather than a whole book (the problem with many non-fiction books today).

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

No, I wouldn't call this a memoir in the strict sense of the word. It is about an intelligent, curious, and knowledgeable reader reading her way through a shelf of books, but the focus on is where those books lead her thinking. I really enjoyed this collection of essays and learned something from every one of them, from the treacheries of translation to the continuing life of The Phantom of the Opera to how libraries "weed" using CREW and MUSTIE. I also liked the way Rose uses technology while reading to get purposefully sidetracked and inform/enlarge her reading experience. Who would think of finding an author on the Internet and arranging to meet for a chat to find out why she stopped writing to breed Newfies? Her essay on women and fiction, women writing fiction, and women's fiction is very thought-provoking including the question: women buy books written by men, so why don't men buy books written by women? Serious Novelist Jonathan Franzen agonizes over being in Oprah's Book Club because being chosen narrows his appeal and, "if you seek admission to the exclusive circle of Great American Novelists, it is the kiss of death to be loved by women." Ouch, that hurts! Also the kiss of death, Rose notes, not to be loved by women, who buy the most books. How does a book become a classic? One certain way is to to be adopted as part of a curriculum and make students read it (or read the Spark Notes). This is tougher in high school. As Rose says, "There are many people who distrust literature entirely and many parents on the lookout for books that might damage their children. There is no corresponding group of parents insisting that their children be offered high-quality or difficult fiction." (Sound of inserted applause here.) Anyway, great collection and the notes in the back extended my understanding of her year of "extreme reading" as she worked her way through her chosen shelf. We should all do this and save a shelf at the local library.

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very original book. Not only is the self-imposed challenge of the author original (read all the books in one almost random library shelf), she is not kidding about this being "extreme reading". She really dove deep into these random books. She finished all the books (and there were some 700+ pages beasts) even the ones she didn't like. One of the books, she read once and didn't like - and then proceeded to read it THREE MORE TIMES until she got why other people like it so much (!!!!). She did research on the books and the authors, contacted people who might explain obscure stories to her. She made friends with some of the authors!!! And, most importantly to me as a reader, she had something intelligent and interesting to say about all the books that she experienced.

This book is not just bookworm fluff, it's got depth. It doesn't matter that the books are not something I'd be personally interested in reading. I'm just happy to read the author talking about them.

[Marianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not without flaws - but I absolutely loved it. If you like books about books, and books about how people think, you will probably love it too. I felt like I was having a one-sided conversation in which the author was doing all the talking but I was having a lot of Thoughts, very much like reading a journal or letters but actually quite carefully structured despite appearances - perhaps more like a really *good* lecture in a very small class. So happy to have read this.

[Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this...I mean, it's a book about books--library books at that! She was a touch pretentious and lit-snobby in places, but I liked it anyway. I loved that the notes at the end included pictures of a few things she mentioned in the text.

[RuthAnn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would recommend: YES

Okay, that said, this book isn't for everyone, but it was definitely for me. There are some books that are for book lovers (like The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, The Thirteenth Tale, and Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore), but this one is for people who love talking and thinking about books, not just reading them. Unlike Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, this book pulls quite the trick of being intellectual but not dry, and I really enjoyed it. I kept pausing and exclaiming over how much I was loving it, and I was sad to see it end. I've been on a pretty erratic reading streak lately, so I appreciated how this arbitrary challenge still resulted in thematic learning. I love the idea of the library as this jungle to be explored.

Favorite lines:

- Certain genres hold themselves cheap. However good they are, however deeply they may affect us, they do not present themselves as more than entertainment. But some kinds of literature demand to be treated respectfully. The obligation is on the reader to live up to them and not so much on them to entertain the reader. What we call literary fiction is a genre with great aspirations. If a novel presents itself as serious, judging it becomes more complicated. That it isn't enjoyable does not immediately disqualify it from having succeeded. Literary fiction can say, "You will learn to love me in time. My difficulties are there for a reason. They will challenge you, but you will learn from them and be changed for the better."

- Changes in consciousness begin with art and take shape through discussion of art. But the process takes a long time and involves a lot of people working in small ways.

- ...the burden of family is now the central issue of women and creativity, whether the creativity is expressed in novels or interior design schemes, litigation or business plans, cupcakes or algorithms.

- The banal advice of writing teachers is "write what you know," but the truth is, you don't know a place until you write about it. "Write what you want to know" is more like it.

- The bookmark has moved from showing all ahead to most behind.

[Damaskcat · Rating 5 out of 5]

The shelf wasn't quite as randomly chosen as the blurb for this book implies. The author wanted to pick a shelf which contained one classic she wanted to read and no more than five books by any one author. The shelf which went from LEQ - LES fitted her criteria and she embarked on reading the books contained on that shelf. She decided that if there were five books by a particular author then she would only undertake to read three of them. As the library she chose for her adventure in reading is a lending library she ran the risk of the shelf changing while she read but she managed to accommodate the changes.

I found it a fascinating book to read as it didn't just cover the books she read but also took a look at libraries and how they decide what to keep and what to buy in the first place. She discussed different formats of the various books and found that in some instances she found the format of the book got in the way of her enjoyment of it. If the book was very old and tatty or was printed in a very small font it was easier and much more enjoyable to read an e-book version where there was nothing to get between the reader and the text.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on 'Phantom of the Opera' as it takes in not just the original text but film adaptations of the story as well as the musical versions. I enjoyed the author's comments on literature in translation and how the translator’s desire to over inform the reader with a plethora of footnotes and explanations can interfere with the enjoyment of the text. Nabokov apparently did this with his translation of ‘A Hero of Our Time’ and the author turned to other translations which she found she could read with much more enjoyment.

If you enjoy books about books then you will probably enjoy this one. The author writes in an easy low key style and while she makes references to other more famous authors I think she succeeded admirably in her stated aim of reading outside the perceived canon of literature as taught in schools and universities. I enjoyed the book so much that I even forgave the author her trenchant comments on mystery and crime novels – which are my particular favourites. The book contains notes and an index.

[Celena · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Exactly what kind of eternity does a library provide?"
This was my favourite question formed from Phyllis Rose's reading adventure in The Shelf. It begins chapter eight on Libraries: Making Space. As a library assistant I enjoyed reading her explain of the need for weeding of library books as it is a much misunderstood necessity of our hallowed halls.
Under a set of somewhat flexible criteria, Rose sets about reading the contents of a shelf from the New York Society Library. She explores the works of William Le Queux, Rhoda Lerman, Etienne Leroux, Gaston Leroux, Mikhail Lermonitov, Alain Le Sage, Margaret Leroy, Lisa Lerner and Alexander Lernet Holenia. I confess to having only heard of two of these writers, but that was one of the motivations for Rose's biblio-adventure. There is a great amount of depth that Rose shares with the reader, I confess not all was interesting to me and I did skim. Having read Gaston Leroux I did find that chapter interesting as I did for Lermonitov's 'A Hero of our Time'. But it was chapter eight that held weight for me. I liked her advice on how to save one of your favourite books from being weeded and her encompassing statement that readers, writers, printers, book keepers "are all workers in words, creators of verbal reality."
"Every time you read a work of fiction you are committing an act gratuity, a gratitious act that proves your freedom." (The kicker being people can read badly written books as easily as they can choose well written works).
Rose did inject a bookish conclusion reminiscent of Mary Schmich's Wear Sunscreen column.
"...explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious... Confront your own values. Perform connoisseurship."
As to eternity..
"Only libraries promote random reading through their open stack and that ultimately random system of organisation, alphabetical order."

[Bookworm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Displays exactly what I dislike about book reviews Phyllis Rose (the author) decides she will read one shelf of book at random at the New York Society Library and read them all. She read the entire shelf and examined what she found, both in terms of the texts themselves, but the authors and their lives, their place in history, etc.
 
Honestly, this was dreadful. The author has an air of pretentiousness and snobbiness that is what I hate about book reviews. She seems to get bogged down in the minutae of the books, their histories, the authors, the book design, etc. Some of it is quite interesting, but sometimes I felt she was really going into the weeds and made it inaccessible for a casual reader.
 
Apparently this is a book loved by professional, paid book reviewers, and I think I can see why. It's a book written for that audience (how many people can afford or even want to pay a yearly fee to be able to check out books at a library like the NYSL??).
 
The author has some interesting thoughts about women in literature, but again, her style of writing really got in the way. I definitely don't recommend this one. I love books about books, reading and bookstores, but there are far better books out there. Might be good if you're aspiring to be a professional book reviewer or are familiar with any of the books she read. Otherwise, I'd skip this one.

[Jo Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved all of Rose's work and leapt on this as soon as I heard about it.

As you'd expect, it's a thoughtful and thought provoking volume, exquisitely written, and I raced through it.

Rose decides to read her way along a library shelf and think about canon, genre, gender, longevity of books and library systems. If you like my writing about books, and if you read in other genres, you will enjoy this. The only thing wrong with it is that it's too short -- I could have happily read twice as much.

More specifically, I was very interested how much work in translation was on her random "LEQ-LES" shelf. I suppose "Le" leads one to French writers, but it still surprised me -- and there were a Russian and an Afrikaans writer there too. I have often read my way along library shelves, not as "extreme" reading and not to muse on the contents, just for something to read and because I love serendipity, and I don't think I've ever happened upon so much international literature. Maybe my libraries are different? (People sometimes ask me how it was I happen to read Sumner Locke Elliott or Kathleen Thompson Norris or Joanna Trollope or W.E.B. Griffin, and I answer "Look, a monkey!" to avoid admitting that I do this.) I'm sorry Rose only happened on one marginally SF novel on her shelf, I'd have been so very interested to see what she made of the genre I work in.

But still, marvellous. Could read this kind of thing all day.

[Bobbi Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phyllis Rose got tired of being told what to read by reviewers, academics, genre purists, and everyone else. She set out to explore unknown and forgotten books, picked a shelf from random in the New York Public Library, and dove right in. I love it. Often upon finishing a book, I get depressed. I can't decide what to read next. I know what I should be reading (and am currently stalled halfway through The Human Comedy), but I always want something else, something more. I love to see other people's shelves. I also love gimmicks, like reading every book I own that has a pastel blue dust jacket. Rose gave me fresh ideas and has even tempted me to pick a Cleveland Public Library shelf.

(By the way, Art Garfunkel has kept a list of every book he has read since 1968. Most of it is on his website.)