Books and Reading

by Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

                Whenever I seem to flag in my reading (like an exercise regimen I’m not fully carrying out, with a

 good measure of guilt), I find that reading a book about books and their readers provides a surge of

energy.  The approaches offered in these books (subject heading “Books and Reading “) are varied. 

Some I can only partially adopt, but all are absorbing because I’m sharing the feeling that reading is

engaging and worth my time.

                My latest energy boost comes from “The Shelf:  Adventures in Extreme Reading” by Phyllis Rose.   Rose is a literary critic, author, and editor.  She’s also an engaged reader, experiencing the thrill of discoveries from the classics to gumshoe detective stories.  Her curiosity and doggedness lead to searches on the Internet, examination of films based on books, and tracking down reclusive authors. 

                The “Shelf,” Rose states in Chapter One, is the “history of an experiment.”  Rose believes that literary critics (and she is one), wrongly favor the famous and canonical.  She wanted to “sample more democratically the actual ground of literature.”  So Rose chose a fiction shelf in the New York Society Library, of which she’s a member with borrowing privileges.  She made up a few guiding principles in choosing:  no work by someone she knew, no more than three books had to be read of a run by one author, and the order of reading didn’t matter.  She selected shelf LEQ – LES, running from William Le Queux to John Lescroart. 

                Each chapter in Rose’s book is an adventure in reading.  In “The Myth of the Book:  A Hero of Our Time” by Lermontov, Rose reads four translations, with varying degrees of success.  The egotistical Pechorin  remains  uninteresting.  The “romantic hero” in her literary studies had never been appealing.   But now Rose makes a real-life association.  Looking at her own son, who happens to be visiting with his wife and baby, Rose sees a young man whose youthful egotism disappeared when he became a father.  This post adolescent Pechorin  needs to move on to fatherhood. 

                In the chapter “Literary Evolution:  The Phantom of the Opera,” Rose moves from the novel  by Gaston Leroux to an examination of the silent film, starring Lon Chaney, to  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical.  She researches the Paris Opera House (now the Palais Garnier) to gain an understanding of the architecture’s impact on the story.  She is intrigued by the silent film’s perfect retelling of the Phantom, and without music.

                Along the way (“Domesticities: Margaret Leroy and Lisa Lerner”), Rose reveals her philosophy of life and why reading great fiction fills a need:  “For me, spontaneity, inclusiveness, and uniqueness are marks of great fiction, as they are of a satisfying life, but that is a personal choice.” 

                In a final chapter (“Immortality”), Rose sums up the results of her experiment.  She has met eleven people (the “Shelf” authors), none of whom she had know at all.  She has gained a respect for the whole range of the literary enterprise, for writers of all sorts because life is difficult, and public attention may be short-lived.  They are all in some way “valiant.”             The book is an exhilarating experience.