The woman who went to the library and read every book on the shelf

Phyllis Rose's book about her extreme reading experiment, in which she tackled the entire contents of a shelf in a New York library, has won high praise, but are such 'bibliomemoirs' a sign of an increasingly superficial literary culture or vital guides for a public swamped by choice?

by: Rachel Cooke

In the summer of 2011, during the quieter days that followed hurricane Irene, the writer Phyllis Rose headed to the New York Society Library on the Upper East Side of the city in search of a 1936 novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Hurricane had been recommended by a friend who knew of her enthusiasm for the pair's earlier adventure story, Mutiny on the Bounty, and with the newspapers still carrying reports of the destruction caused by Irene, what better time to read it? Once it was in her hand, however, her enthusiasm for it began to trickle away. She had had enough of storms. The novel was duly returned to its space on the shelf.

The question was: what should she read instead? It goes without saying that she was spoilt for choice. The New York Society Library, founded in 1754 by a group of young men who believed its existence would help the city prosper, is a gloriously well-stocked institution (its reference room is open to all, but only members may take books home). George Washington borrowed books from it and so, later, did Truman Capote and Willa Cather. Its current home was built in 1917, with the result that it comes with more than a hint of gilded-age splendour. Rose considers this place of marble, murals and mahogany to be the cheapest luxury in New York.

Beside her in the stacks was a shelf of other books by Nordhoff and Hall, rather a long shelf, in fact, and looking around, she noticed lots of similarly extensive runs of volumes by just one author. Sometimes, these were writers whose names she knew thanks to only one title and sometimes these were writers she did not know at all. This was unnerving. It made her mildly anxious, her sudden awareness of all these unknown authors and their unknown books, and perhaps as a means of assuaging this unease, she began to formulate a plan. What if she was to pick, at random, a fiction shelf and read her way through its contents? What, if anything, would she learn?

As she pondered this idea, she felt a tug of excitement. In their obscurity, these books might be dull, bad or even unreadable; they might, in fact, be a total waste of her time. But she also felt certain that, should she embark on such a scheme, she would find herself on the readerly equivalent of virgin snow, for who else would have read this precise sequence of novels? This thought was intriguing. Such an adventure might even be worth writing about. (Rose, the author of the brilliant Parallel Lives, which tells the story of five Victorian literary marriages, had not published a book for more than a decade.)

Choosing a shelf, though, was tricky. How to avoid ending up with a row of books by a single, prolific author? Perhaps this could not be an entirely random process, after all. Her shelf, she decided, would have to represent several writers, only one of whom could have more than five books to his or her name (and she would commit herself to reading just three). It would need to contain a mixture of contemporary and older works and one book had to be a classic she had always wanted to read but had never got round to. Two hundred possible shelves later, she finally found one that met her criteria. It was marked LEQ-LES and ran from the hack Edwardian mystery writer William Le Queux to the American author of bestselling thrillers John Lescroart, by way of Rhoda Lerman (contemporary literary fiction), Mikhail Lermontov (author of the Russian classic A Hero of Our Time), Lisa Lerner (her dystopian feminist novel, Just Like Beauty, was published in 2002), Alexander Lernet-Holenia (an Austrian novelist who died in 1986), Etienne Leroux (an Afrikaner novelist much admired by Graham Greene), Gaston Leroux (the French detective writer best known for The Phantom of the Opera), James LeRossignol (a Canadian economist and short story writer), Margaret Leroy (the British writer whose novel Yes, My Darling Daughter was selected for Oprah Winfrey's summer book club) and Alain-René Lesage (author of Gil Blas, a 17th-century masterpiece of the picaresque).

What followed was sometimes hard work and sometimes great fun. It was exasperating but also invigorating; deeply boring and yet surprisingly exciting. Rose discovered several writers whose work she truly loved (Rhoda Lerman's out-of-print God's Ear; Lesage's Gil Blas), but there were several with whom she could not get on at all, chief among them the bewildering Etienne Leroux. Sometimes, she would race through a book, wondering how it had evaded her for so long, for instance, Just Like Beauty, a strikingly prescient first novel, now out of print, in which women are systematically trained to give men pleasure. At other times, she had to have several goes (A Hero of Our Time), either because she did not at first take to the story, or for more prosaic reasons (she hated the translation; the physical edition did not appeal). And on and on.

Eventually, she turned each encounter into an essay, using her experiences not only to contemplate the novels themselves – Rose is a close and extremely clever reader – but also such things as posterity, reputation, the arc of a career, the way women writers are treated in our literary culture, the pros and cons of Amazon reviews, the future of our libraries and even of reading itself. She called the result The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading, and it was published in the US, to some acclaim, last June.

Down the line from her son's home in Boulder, Colorado, Rose laughs. I have asked her if, since she finished writing The Shelf, her reading life has remained off piste or if she is simply wading through Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, just like everyone else. "Oh, you're wicked!" she says, with some glee. "I love The Goldfinch! Actually, though, I'm reading the Elizabeths: Taylor, Bowen, Jane Howard. Right now, I'm reading Angel [by Elizabeth Taylor] and it's wonderful. It reminds me of so many of my nutty writer friends; unlike everyone else, I read it as severe realism. The truth is that I've always been an off piste reader, really." This is not to say that The Shelf hasn't had an impact. She and Rhoda Lerman, "a wonderful, remarkable woman", have become great friends (during the writing of The Shelf, Rose contacted her on the internet, wanting to know why she'd swapped writing for breeding champion Newfoundlands). Thanks to her efforts, moreover, it looks like Lerman's out-of-print novels are to be republished. "Peter Mayer [the former chief executive of Penguin] has said that he wants to make her a star, and that's just so great. I'm so happy to have set this chain of events in motion." Lisa Lerner, another writer Rose praises, has also returned to writing fiction (when her first novel was effectively killed off by a wilfully ignorant review in the New York Times, she turned to TV instead). "So perhaps I can give myself a little pat on the back for that, too."

Rose isn't a dinosaur reader; she likes her Kindle. Nor is she a pessimist. It's impossible to be too gloomy, she says, when so many good new writers keep appearing. All the same, The Shelf is a call to arms. "I wanted to make people aware of libraries as an ecosystem that are threatened in the same way as coral reefs. There's a kind of serendipity that occurs in a library that never happens online. Browsing a stack is a unique experience: that feeling of being attracted by a book, by its cover or typography. What makes me melancholy is the thought of books disappearing from libraries." (If nothing else, by taking the novels on her shelf out of the library, she has made her own contribution to their continued presence there; books that are not borrowed regularly soon find themselves on their way to great stack in the sky).

She also wanted to celebrate writers, in all their guises. "I love writers. I have huge respect for them: the geniuses and the hacks. I even have respect for John Lescroart [in her book, she likens Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky, the heroes of his crime thrillers, to cardboard]. People who disrespect the enterprise of writers don't know how hard it is. The other night, I went to the Colorado music festival to hear a pianist playing Mozart. This guy was a decent pianist, but he wasn't great. Yet the audience went nuts; they were on their feet, cheering and hollering. If only people would channel some of that enthusiasm to writers. If only people stood up and applauded when they got to the end of a book."



At first sight, this is a statement that seems entirely at odds with 21st-century literary culture, with our collective passion for literary festivals, our determination endlessly to recommend and debate our reading choices on Twitter, Facebook and in blogs. Rose's book is, moreover, just one of many "bibliomemoirs" published this year, volumes whose very existence suggests a certain hunger and deep feeling for books. But this is complicated. Talking about books, Rose agrees, is not at all the same as reading them; in any festival crowd, much of the audience, if not most, will not have read the book that is being discussed and have no intention of doing so in the future (we both have experience of this). It is the "live" experience they're after and the feeling that they are part of a crowd. Some of these bibliomemoirs, even as they celebrate the books their authors love, are also a symptom of something altogether less happy. "I see very well that there is this movement to cherish what we have before it is lost," says Rose. "I think a lot of people feel reading is on the verge of being lost. 'Crisis' would sound melodramatic. But certainly, we are taking it less for granted; we're trying to hold on to something before it disappears."

The internet presents readers with a bewildering amount of choice. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

When the New Yorker reviewed The Shelf, its critic Christine Smallwood made the very good point that as the number of people who read declines, those who continue to treasure books have become rather proud of themselves, "even a little over-identified with the enterprise". What she didn't say is how odd this is. These readers make so much noise. Yet reading is quiet and solitary. It's internal. If you really care about a book, moreover, discussing it can be painful; hearing a novel you love be misinterpreted, or trashed, is a horrible, rage-inducing thing. It's for this reason that noisy readers make me suspicious. If they love it so much, why do they feel the need to go on about loving it? How do they even find the time? Why isn't their nose already deep in their next book?

In the world of the bibliomemoir, Rose's book, which explores mostly unknown and obscure novels, stands very much alone. Others published this year deal in titles that are popular, well-loved and regularly dramatised (in this country, at least) on television and radio. Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is devoted to George Eliot's masterpiece; Samantha Ellis's How to Be a Heroine is a fond re-examination of the stories she loved as a girl, among them Wuthering Heights, The Bell Jar, Pride and Prejudice and Gone With the Wind; among the 50 great books Andy Miller includes on his List of Betterment in The Year of Reading Dangerously are Catch-22, Lord of the Flies, Crime and Punishment and The Code of the Woosters. So who are such bibliomemoirs for? If you are a reader, wouldn't you rather be reading Moby-Dick than reading a book about a stranger who is reading Moby-Dick – and if you aren't, why would you pick up a book about reading in the first place? These books, however endearing, funny and insightful, strike me as just another form of talking about books rather than actually reading them. Go to the text! I want to shout, bossily.

Is this unfair? Andy Miller thinks it is. In fact, he sounds rather cross with me. "I don't want my book to be a shortcut to reading Middlemarch," he says. "I'd rather people connected with books directly, and if you read mine to find out what happens in Middlemarch, well... you won't. But this is a time when reading feels weirdly aspirational. On one level, it has never been more popular: Twitter and festivals and all that. But on another, sitting there, reading on your own and then thinking about it for a bit, feels increasingly like a difficult thing to pull off."

His book, he believes, reflects this aspiration. Writing it, moreover, was a mildly transgressive act for someone who read English at the University of Sussex in the 80s, when literary theory was all the rage and it was strictly forbidden to talk about how a book made you feel. "I wanted to place books in the real world rather than the world of the TLS. I wanted to relate them to how most people read, which is a stewing together of film and music and life experiences."

Miller is busy promoting his book at literary festivals up and down the country, and the better to do this, he has devised Read Y'Self Fitter, a 10-step programme that aims to cure his audience of their bad reading habits. How does it work? "At the beginning, I ask people to fill out a form with their name and a book they've always meant to read and never got round to, and then I ask them to sign it so that it's legally binding. I gather up all the forms in a hat. After this, I talk them through the 10 steps, explaining how they can engage with books in the busy modern world in which we live. At the end, I pull a few of the forms out of the hat and tell the audience what, if anything, I know about the books on them. Finally, I get everyone to join in an affirmation. Basically, I'm sending the person out enthused enough to read the book – and it actually works. People want that encouragement. The response has been amazing."

Can he give me an example of one of the 10 steps? "The first one is: we don't need to talk about We Need to Talk About Kevin. What I mean is that it's about choosing for yourself, stepping out of the chatter. For a long time, Kevin seemed to be the only book anyone was reading. Now that book might be Stoner [John Williams's 1965 classic, the surprise bestseller of 2013]. But you don't have to read Stoner. It's a fantastic book, but it's been a fantastic book for 50 years. You're allowed to read something else." In this sense, he believes that Read Y'Self Fitter, like the memoir that inspired it, offers reading as an alternative to merely talking about reading. In other words, I should just lay off.

Others seem to feel the same. "Talking about books only increases my pleasure in reading," Samantha Ellis tells me, when we discuss How to Be a Heroine. "An aspect of my book is about opening up the conversation with more people." But she was also keen to champion rereading – a casualty of publishers' frantic marketing and the endless chatter on places such as Twitter, where one must always be seen to be reading something new – and to rediscover the magic of the way she read as a girl. "I wanted to really immerse myself in these books and people have responded to that. I've had lots of emails in which people have told me: this book was important to me at five, or at 10, and here's why." Does the modern world work against total immersion in novels or is this just an inevitable consequence of growing up? She isn't sure. "Personally, I don't find reading hard. I'll just turn my phone off." She laughs. "Though not for hours!"

Ellis views the Aladdin's cave effect of the internet, which has brought us Amazon, Abe and Project Gutenberg, as a good thing: people can easily follow their literary obsessions, however weird or obscure, and so cheaply, too (Project Gutenberg, a digital library, is free). But perhaps this is also another reason for the popularity of bibliomemoirs. Do they offer a way through the jungle? John Sutherland, the emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor at University College, London, thinks it might be the case; his recent book, How to Be Well Read, is not a memoir, but it is highly personal. The 500 great novels summarised among its pages are only those that have for him "stuck like limpets on the bottom of a boat" in the 70 years he has been a reader. "People want guidebooks," he says. "Or, failing that, lists. In 1951, if you wanted to read a book, you had to put your name on a waiting list at the library. These days, it's all there, and this is an utterly good thing. For years, I couldn't teach a course on the 'new woman' novel to my students because they could not get hold of the texts. Now they're all ready to download at Project Gutenberg. But when you're in a vast supermarket, you also have a problem, which is: what should I put in my basket? A lot of these books are a way of imposing geography on the huge access we have now."

Sutherland also believes – if you are an author, this will perhaps sound alarming – that 21st-century readers want and expect more from their books; they would like them, among many other things, to be manuals. "What people are saying is: ownership of the text is mine as much as it is yours." Fan fiction reflects this, and perhaps bibliomemoirs do, too.



One thing all these books undeniably have in common is the importance they place on reading, their conviction, albeit implicit, that it is a good and even vital way for a person to spend his time. But why is it? Beyond issues of literacy, why does it matter if a person reads, or not? This is a question I have sometimes struggled to answer myself, for all that I feel that I can quite easily divide the people I know into those who read, especially novels, and those who don't (the readers are, to me, more interesting, more empathetic and less dogmatic – and I mean about everything). I ask a couple of my bibliomemoirists what they think. Miller says, fascinatingly, that reading is now an alternative to the mainstream, that it is a counterculture these days, and it is this that he relishes: "People say that reading gives you a map of the world, that it helps you make sense of experiences. But for me, it is a way out, not a way in. I value it for that."

But I like Phyllis Rose's response more, perhaps because it chimes so strongly with my own. "My answer is a selfish one," she tells me, her voice brimming with conviction. "Reading helps me enjoy my life more fully. It opens it up and I bet it does for other people, too. I have older siblings who are not readers and they're wonderful people. But they live their lives much less freely than I do. I have experienced more things vicariously than they have. I can entertain ideas that are more radical. It's to do with flexibility."

If this is true – and I believe that it is – then all we can hope is that the bibliomemoir in its current and most prevalent form is not simply another expression of our growing tendency to skate over the surface of things, scrolling down when we should be taking our time; that these books really are reminding people of the deep and abiding pleasures of reading, sending them back to novels that they love or to pay others a first visit. Let us hope, in fact, that they are helping some people to answer the questions that floated into Phyllis Rose's mind as she stood in the stacks of the New York Society Library. What should I read next? Where will it take me? What will I be missing if I leave this book to gather dust on a shelf? As questions go, these are the kind I like the best.

from: Guardian