Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I'm on my, like, ninth watch-through of Gilmore Girls.

And there's this episode where Rory, the teen character, is scolded by her high school headmaster for

always reading a book during lunch and not making more friends. Long story short, she tries to socialize,

ends up getting in trouble, and at the end of the episode, Rory is vindicated and is back to

reading at lunch. It's the kind of storyline that is absolutely irresistible, bordering on pandering

to people like me, and I suspect if you're listening to this podcast, people like you,

you know, hell being other people and all that. But Claire Louise Bennett's new novel, Checkout

19, is all about living a life of books, of always having your head in one, or at least always

having one around. And she tells NPR Scott Simon about the danger of that, of absorbing all these lives

of other people through books before getting the chance to live one yourself.

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Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 is the novel of a lifelong love affair between a narrator

with no name and love interests that range from Aristotle, Anaise Nin, and Anne Frank

to Iris Murdoch, Sydney Sheldon, The Silence of the Lambs, and 100 years of solitude.

In fact, the books don't even need to be open.

Let's ask Claire Louise Bennett to give her voice to her unnamed narrator.

It was entirely possible we realized to get a great deal from a book without even opening it.

Just having it there beside us for ages was really quite special. It was actually because we

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