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

Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment -- to systematically read her way through a random shelf of books in the library, LEQ-LES, "fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels." An original take on literary taste and habits by the acclaimed author of Parallel Lives.

Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actua...