During the course of one of his projects, which involved reading short books he thought he could get through in a day, Queenan began to employ a hard-and-fast rule. "I would go to the library 鈥� often without my reading glasses 鈥� and select compact works of fiction that seemed like things I would enjoy," he wrote. "Often I was only guessing, as the jacket copy was in type too small to read. If I got home and discovered that I had checked out a bittersweet, life-affirming novel about a recently divorced woman who had moved to a small town in Maine or the Massif Central or the Mull of Kintyre and, after initially being shocked by the ham-fisted demeanor of the rough-hewn locals, was seduced by their canny charm, I took it straight back."
