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

“Exhilarating, adventurous, original . . . The Shelf is a reminder of what reading and writing are all about.” —Azar Nafisi,#1 New York Times–bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

After a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, Phyllis Rose decided to read like an explorer. Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it.

What results is a spirited experiment in “Off-Road or Extreme Reading.” Rose's shelf of roughly thirty books has everything she could wish for—a remarkable variety of authors and a range of literary ambitions and 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 tales about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels and a novel from an Afrikaans writer who fascinates Rose to the extent that she ends up watching a YouTube video of his funeral.

A joyous testament to the thrill of engagement with books high and low, The Shelf leaves us with the feeling that there are treasures to be found on every library or bookstore shelf.

“Simple but radical.” —Chicago Tribune

“Rose is consistently generous, knowledgeable, and chatty, with a knack for connecting specific incidents to large social trends.” —The New Yorker

“Immensely appealing . . . . teaches us much about how to approach life as it does about how to read books.” — Boston Globe

“Readers of The Shelf will feel befriended.” —The New York Times

“Rose rallies readers to affirm our love of literature and libraries.” —Booklist (starred review)

© 2025 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9780374709792

Release date

Ebook: 14 March 2025