The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose (2014) - Go to a library near you. Choose a bookshelf at random. Then read through all the books in that particular shelf. This is what Phyllis Rose (Woman of Letters) did. And she wrote about the experiment in this book. Rose had a career reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books. It was clockwork and tiring. So Rose decided to read like an explorer. Just sail into an ocean of books and choose what to read in random. So she went to the New York Society Library, chose a shelf at random, and read her way through the books in that shelf.