In 2011, biographer Phyllis Rose (author of the National Book Award finalist Woman of Letters) had a reading epiphany: most of us choose to read books prescribed by reviewers, awards panels, librarians and teachers. If we limit ourselves to the current and the canonical, she wondered, what are we missing? She decided to sample one shelf of fiction--LEQ to LES--in an Upper East Side library as a representation of the whole library. Her criteria: the shelf must include a classic she hadn't read, nothing written by her acquaintances, and no more than four books per author. The Shelf from LEQ to LES is the story of Rose's experiment in what she calls "extreme reading."
Rose's discussions of the books themselves are thoughtful and intelligent, but the heart of The Shelf is the undertaking as a whole rather than the titles read. Without the framework of recommendations, Rose builds her own context for and relationship with the 23 books and 11 authors on her shelf. She reaches out to editors, reviewers, a cover designer and two of the authors in an effort to understand how each book works, or doesn't. In the process, she explores broader bookish issues: the interaction between translator and text, how libraries decide which books to discard, the thorny questions that still surround women and literary achievement, how novels such as Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera survive in popular imagination long after they're no longer regularly read.
Written in the vein of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Rose's volume may well inspire readers to undertake their own adventures in extreme reading. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins