{"product_id":"9780374709792","title":"The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePhyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment—to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ–LES\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCan you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the \"real ground of literature,\" she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES.\u003cbr\u003e     The shelf has everything Rose could wish for—a classic she has not read, a remarkable variety of authors, and a range of literary styles. The early nineteenth-century Russian classic \u003ci\u003eA Hero of Our Time\u003c\/i\u003e by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with \u003ci\u003eThe Phantom of the Opera\u003c\/i\u003e by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside those about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels abut a picaresque novel from the seventeenth century\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e There are several novels by a wonderful, funny, contemporary novelist who has turned to raising dogs because of the tepid response to her work.\u003cbr\u003e     In \u003ci\u003eThe Shelf\u003c\/i\u003e, Rose investigates the books on her shelf with exuberance, candor, and wit while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf—those texts that accompany us through life. \"Fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels,\" she sustains a sense of excitement as she creates a refreshingly original and generous portrait of the literary enterprise.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47118472872176,"sku":"9780374709792","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780374709792_p0.jpg?v=1769913121","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780374709792","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}