'That Will Always Stick with You'

Terry Teachout has revived a decade-old meme that I indulged in but had forgotten. Here are the rules: “Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.” I decided to postpone reading my list from 2009 and to start from scratch in 2019:

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris: A.J. Liebling

Life of Johnson: James Boswell

The Geography of the Imagination: Guy Davenport

Lives of the English Poets: Samuel Johnson

The American Scene: Henry James

American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz: Whitney Balliett

And Even Now: Max Beerbohm

Gulliver’s Travels: Jonathan Swift

Plays and Poems: William Shakespeare

The Ideal of Culture: Joseph Epstein

Pale Fire: Vladimir Nabokov

Stories: Anton Chekhov

The Collected Poems: 1956-1998: Zbigniew Herbert

Daniel Deronda: George Eliot

Essays: Montaigne

Nine of the fifteen authors from ten years ago remain on the list. In the case of Liebling, I switched allegiance to another title (I can’t go wrong with Liebling.). Only one living author (Epstein) is there, and it was tough choosing only one of his titles. Immediately I see the absences. Where are Italo Svevo, Spinoza, Santayana, J.V. Cunningham, Proust, Whittaker Chambers, Geoffrey Hill and Gibbon? Where are the King James Bible, The Divine Comedy and Tristram Shandy? How fortunate I am to have an overflowing list.

The old list was booby-trapped with sadness. I had forgotten that the late David Myers and I assembled lists without a single shared title. Five of the books on his list I still haven’t read and probably never will. Friendship need not be rooted in agreement.