A Bookseller's Diary: 32 books I wish I could read again for the first time

Buzzfeed asked its readers if they had a book they wish they could read again for the first time: an interesting question, and one that set us to thinking, what would our list include? Buzzfeed boiled its readers responses down to a list of 32.

I pondered the question, and here's my list, dashed off in a few minutes last night I just went with what came to me. If I had to think about all the thousands of books I've read, the list would have no end:

1.  Peter Cameron, The Weekend (1994). An astonishingly elegant tale of a weekend in the country,on the anniversary of a man's death whose life links everyone there.

2.  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1970). My mother brought me this book from the library when I was down with the flu in February, 1970. In many respects, it changed the arc of my life.

3. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865). My parents gave me a Signet Classics paperback copy in 1962. Over the next half century I discovered the great children's books keep revealing themselves in new and unexpected ways as we grow, and grow older.

4.  Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale (1983), and A Soldier of the Great War (1991). Helprin is a master story-teller. Winter's Tale is a fantasy that is impossible yet utterly believable. A Soldier of the Great War had me at the end of the first chapter, in which a very old man and a very young one get put off a streetcar heading into the suburbs of Rome in August, 1964. As they walk through the night to their destination, the old man tells the young one the amazing and heart-breaking story of his times in World War I. I remember getting to the end of the first chapter and realizing I had 700 pages to go. It was a leap into a great adventure.

5.  Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Selling (1999). Reading this book convinced me, with absolute clarity, that, whatever the obstacles, I must act on the dream of being a bookseller.

6.  Dante, Inferno (John Ciardi, trans. 1954). Another Signet Classic, a college book a cousin had left behind at her parent's house, where I spent much of the summer of 1971 while my mother was seriously ill. Dante has some serious scores to settle, dude.

7.  Donald Morris, The Washington of the Spears (1965). I picked up a paperback of this remarkable account of the Zulu Nation and the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, in Durban, South Africa in 1974. I was on a course with the Wilderness Leadership School, whose founder, Ian Payer, died recently. That experience picked up where Silent Spring had left off four years earlier. I lugged that Picador paperback around until it fell apart, and then replaced it with the hardcover copy I have today.

8.  Elie Wiesel, Night (1960). A survivor's account of the Nazi death camps. Unforgettable, as it should be.

9.  Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957). I only read this book a few years ago, having seen two movies made of it. Both films were good; the first is almost great. The book is brilliant. Its tale of Australians and Americans waiting for a worldwide post-nuclear war radiation cloud to kill them all is all the more timely today, as we think it can;t happen any more.

10. C.P. Cavafy, Before Time Could Change Them: The Collected Poems (Theoharis Constantine Theoharis trans., 2001). Published only in chapbooks he handed out to friends, Cavafy is now recognized as a lion of Greek poetry.

11. Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Collected Letters (1988). When I read an except of Sally Fitzgerald's collection of her friend's correspondence in The Georgia Review, I had to have the book.

12. T.R. Pearson, A Short History of A Small Place (1985). I heard the first chapter of this story of life in a North Carolina town, seen through the eyes of a small boy, read by Dick Estell on The Radio Reader when driving home to Portland, Oregon from the 1986 World's Fair in Vancouver, Canada. I was so dazzled by Pearson's ability to reduce to print the splendid loquacity of Southern speech, I drove straight to Powell's City of Books and bought a copy. When he publishes a book, I buy it.

13. Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988). Rarely has the promise of a first novel been as richly realized as in the career of Michael Chabon. This story of a doomed college romance is funny, sad, and wise. When Chabon read the story, A" Model World," at Powell's in 1991, a woman in the audience asked, after we'd listened, rapt, to the story of a doctoral student in meteorology for half an hour, "How much research did you have to do on the weather phenomena in the story." Chabon replied, "None. I made it up." That's when I realized he was a truly great writer.

14. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). I think this was another "home sick" read in the late 1960s; by the time Christie died in 1976 I owned all of her books. My favorite was- and remains, Death Comes As The End, a tale of ancient Egypt published in 1944- but Ackroyd smacked me between the eyes when the murderer's identity was revealed.

15. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines  (1987). A dashing, mysterious, incredibly erudite writer with a unique style, Chatwin turned travel writing on its head with this story of the Australian Outback and its aboriginal inhabitants. His death, at 49, was a body blow. So much more could have been.

16. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). If you seek to understand urban development in post-war America, this book stands alone. Winner of the Parkman and Pulitzer Prizes, it tells the life of a man who never held public office but held more power almost anyone of his time.

17. Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961). Like Charlotte's Web, this is a book that could not be the book it is without its illustrations- here, by Jules Feiffer. And from this book I learned not to jump to conclusions.

18. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). 'nuff said.

19. John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights (1951). Imagine Saki in a world where devils become psychoanalysts and plants eat people, couples plan to poison each other, and store manikins come alive, and you have John Collier. In "Bottle Party:, Franklin Fletcher buys a bottle with a genie in it from. He embarks on a tour through time to experience the most beautiful women on history,only to find the genie had been there first. Planning to restopper his unsatisfying benefactor, Franklin gets plugged in the bottle himself. "Next day, he was picked up, whisked through the air, and deposited in the dirty little shop, among the other bottles, from which this one had never been missed.

"There he remained for an interminable period, covered all over with dust and frantic with rage at the thought of what was going on in his exquisite palace, between his jinn and his faithless charmer. In the end, some sailors happened to drift into the shop, and, hearing that this bottle contained the most beautiful girl in the world, they bought it up by general subscription of the fo'c'sle. When they unstoppered him at sea and found it was only poor Frank, their disappointment knew no bounds, and they used him with the utmost barbarity."

20. Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides (1991). Conroy runs his readers through emotional wringers, then draws and quarters their feelings, and drops them in a heap at the end of his books. I read his books, knowing they are going to make me crazy for a while, but mostly glad for the experience. Prince of Tides, however, I found so wrenching when I was done I put it on the shelf and have never been able to pick it up again.

Neither have I been able to get rid of it.

21. Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion (1931). The "forgotten Inkling," Williams was an editor at the Oxford University Press. A prolific writer in every genre, it seems, Williams crossed my path in a college religion class. Like his friend C.S.Lewis, Williams wrote a series of Christian fantasy novels set in modern times that are in a class of their own. In The Place of the Lion, the ancient Platonic Forms assume dimension and movement in the English countryside, drawing out the best and worst in the novel's characters. My experience working through the Williams novels led me, in 1978, to-

22. Iris Murdoch, A Word Child (1975). The 1978 event was ending up on a flight to London with a man I'd met at a wedding earlier that year; we were both heading to Oxford and he was reading Murdoch's Booker Prize-winning retelling of The Tempest, The Sea, The Sea. I ended gathering all of Murdoch's novels to my shelves over the next two decades; I remember thinking, after finishing her last- 1995's Jackson's Dilemma- "something's wrong." Two years later she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and two years later, she was dead. Murdoch loved playing with Platonic Forms, and in A Word Child a miserable man- a civil servant trying to find surcease of his misery, ends up on a course of action that leads to his responsibility for the deaths of two wives of the same man.

23. Henry James, The Portrait of A Lady (1881). At 52 I thought, "I'm old enough to try Henry James." Portrait of A Lady is a rather Murdochian plot, involving an independent young American, heiress to an English fortune. Determined not to imprison herself in a stifling marriage and the confinements of upper class manners, all her decisions to not reach that end place her precisely at it. James the stylist is amazing; his portrayals of women struck me as remarkably modern.

24. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961). If only our 21st century entanglements in the Middle East had a Heller. Perhaps, yet, they will.

25. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). In high school, the thing I most wanted was to get into Mrs. Rogers' AP English class. She was a tough grader, a non-nonsense teacher, and taught high school seniors as if they were in college.

I made the class. Mrs. Rogers was diagnosed with cancer and went on leave. She picked a handful of the incoming class to read A Day with her, at her home, in her study, a spare bedroom she converted into a book-filled study. By the time we finished the Solzhenitsyn, and chose the next book, we knew there would not be a next book. Solzhenitsyn became a cause celebre in the West until the Soviet Union expelled him in 1974; he spent twenty increasingly unhappy years in the United States before returning to Russia and another fifteen years there as a public scold. He could not escape the times that made- and warped- him.

26. Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (1930). A retired girls' school head, Hamilton published The Greek Way at 62 and became internationally famous; at 90 she was made an honorary citizen of Athens. I read The Greek Way in high school; it was my first introduction to the classics of that age, and that, in college, led me to-

27. Aristophanes, Plays (Penguin, Dudley Fitts, trans.) (1954-59). I'd tried a couple of Loeb Classics editions of Aristophanes, but couldn't find anything in them like the raucous joy and satire Edith Hamilton cited. Fitts' translations- the first of which I bought in Athens on a college course in 1977- hit just the right note of bawdiness. My love affair with the black Penguin Classics, which lasted through hundreds of volumes, began on a January afternoon in the Greek capital.

28. William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill (3 vols) (1983, 1988, 2012) has been worth the thirty year wait to finish. Manchester was a writer with the dash and flair to write great events in capitals; surely no subject better suited his bright palette than Churchill. They are worth the price just for the sweeping introductions to the first two volumes; the third, completed by Paul Martin, brings the story safely home.

29. Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (1996). Robert Coles wrote of this book, "these pages offer the voice of Kathleen Norris, a person of modern sensibility who dares leap across time and space to make the interests and concerns of any number of reflective thinkers her own, and by virtue of her direct, engaging prose. Feisty and moody, stubbornly her own person, she nevertheless has her soul brothers and sisters. Her writing is personal, epigrammatic -- a series of short takes that ironically address the biggest subject matter possible: how one ought live a life, with what purposes in mind." A constant companion of mine through difficult times.
30. Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992). A thriller-cum-black comedy wrapped in a modern Greek tragedy. Brilliantly told, through unusual and sharply-defined characters. The last third of the book tickled my fondness for disastrous funerals; and I was greatly taken by the forbidding, yet endearing, Platonist, Henry Winter.

31. Proulx, Annie, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). In just thirty pages of this collection of stories, Proulx produced Brokeback Mountain. As E.B. White wrote of Walden's table of contents, "Sweet are the uses of brevity."

32. I'll tell you about this one after I read it.