Possessions, say the sages, are a distraction and a hindrance. Let them go! The Last Bookshelf begins with a great unburdening as a long-time reader casts off a lifetime's worth of favorite books. The emptying of the shelves is a joy and a liberation. Afterward, however, it seems that the shelves are not perfectly empty, that a few novels remain: enough books to fill one last shelf.The Last Bookshelf is an exploration of the powerful connections that can arise between an individual reader and a novel, of how a fictional world can become bound up in the world of the reader's own experience. Each of the book's twenty chapters covers one or more novels by authors including Zane Grey, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Cao Xueqin, James Crumley, Marilynne Robinson, Thomas Pynchon, Mario Vargas Llosa and a dozen others. The essays focus on one novel at a time, aiming to get to the heart of each novel's appeal, describe its pleasures, and give a hint of the illumination it offers.
