December 8, 2013
Sunday

There’s a meme going around Facebook which asks that you list 10 books that have “stayed with you.” Most people name the great novels they’ve read, or the nonfiction works that spurred them to become vegetarian or pacifist or radicalized liberal, or the books of poems that taught them the most about love, or loss, or longing.

I’ve decided to take a different approach. Here are ten books that have, quite literally, stayed with me. They all came with me to this house in 1976. The one I’ve had the longest was a gift to me in 1952, when I was five. The most recent was acquired in 1971. I’ve written about at least one of them before. In the days to come, look for a piece, or several, about some of the others.

Bottom to top, the books are:

Better Homes and Gardens Second Story Book, Betty O’Connor, ed. 1952
Pridwen 1965, Yearbook of Bishop McDevitt High School, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld, first published 1964; 25th printing, 1971
Valedictory, MacKinlay Kantor, 1939, acquired by theft from my school library, 1964
The Old Testament of the Holy Bible, Confraternity Version, 1965
The Possessed, Fyodor Doestoevsky, Signet Classics edition, 1962, acquired 1966
The Aeneid of Virgil, a new verse translation by C. Day Lewis, 1953, acquired 1964
The Guntoter and Other Stories of the Missouri Hills, MacKinlay Kantor, gift of the author, 1963
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, Popular Library edition, 1962
Best American Short Shorts, Scholastic Book Services, 1958, acquired 1962