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

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. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (May)