I get more value from Goodreads author pages & book summaries ... and far more entertainment from reader reviews!! ( )

Fascinating book. ( )

Enjoyable and likable book, as Rose reads her way through a somewhat randomly-selected shelf of books at the New York Library society. Along the way she encounters the frustration of Vladimir Nabokov's excessive footnoting and condescending remarks in his translation of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, the unexpected pleasures of the doorstop picaresque novel Gil Blas, the discovery of a mostly forgotten novelist, Rhoda Lerman, with whom she becomes friends, and the horrors of the once immensely popular William Le Queux. There are a few others as well, and Rose's comments are fair and perceptive, showing the ability to appreciate parts of even the worst things on her chosen shelf. She also understands the different motivators of these very different writers. I also appreciate that she doesn't knock e-readers, and even speaks of their advantages for transparent reading (vs. reading an old paperback whose pages are crumbling and coming unglued as you read.) Rose goes off on some sidetracks regarding why men don't read books by women and why some women authors are not given the same respect as male authors, even when they write about the same thing. A male author writing a book about a domestic situation is considered "literary fiction", while the woman's book is considered "women's fiction". Rose's points are well made and she doesn't rant.

I'm not sure if I want to pick a shelf of my own and try this experiment. Actually, given how many unread books I have downstairs, I could just do it at home! ( )

Phyllis Rose, a literary critic, found herself thinking about how many books -- surely including many very good books -- are never paid any attention by critics and are unfairly doomed to obscurity. Almost on a whim, she decided on a project to explore this wider world of literature, at least a little bit: she chose a single shelf from a library and (mostly) read every book on that shelf, no matter what it was. (It's worth noting that the library was a private lending library, and the shelf was carefully chosen, so this isn't a scientific random sampling or anything, but that's not really the point.) She ended up reading an interesting variety of fiction, some more obscure than others, from an 18th century picaresque tome to contemporary women's fiction.

This sounds very much like the sort of thing that's likely to appeal to me, but I was still surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Rose thinks very deeply about everything she reads, but the way she writes about those thoughts is wonderfully accessible. And she really goes above and beyond with this project, exploring the works she reads thoroughly, doing research on them, even sometimes contacting (and, in one case, striking up an odd friendship with) the authors. You'd think all of that might get a little tedious, actually, or that listening to someone talk about books you've never read (and, for the most part, have no desire to read) would get dull after a while, but it never does. I now sort of feel as if all these books are old friends of mine, and maybe Phyllis Rose is, too. The whole thing just made me one happy little book-lover. ( )

Rose chose a shelf of (ironically) fiction books in her library and read each of them, reporting on her progress, the history behind the books, and other literary tidbits. Quite enjoyable. ( )