My family shares an 1860s house with my wife’s parents. We’ve been spring-cleaning this weekend, and one of the tasks was to straighten out the old bookcases that are scattered around their side and our side of the big house. In one small wooden bookcase on their side, one partial record of reading lives goes like this (a selected list):

Learning Irish by Micheal O. Siadhail; David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean; Let’s Go 1989: Paris; Let’s Go 1994: Britain & Ireland; Let’s Go 1996: Switzerland & Austria; Letters from the Underworld by Dostoevsky; Robert Frost’s Poems; Life, Letters, and a Diary by Lucy Larcom; Alarms and Diversions by James Thurber; Collecting Nostalgia by John Mebane; Jane Eyre by Bronte; Madame Curie by Alice Thorne; History of County Clare by Sean Spellissy; My Life in Court by Louis Nizer; Haiku Harvest: Japanese Haiku; Lexington and Concord by Arthur Tourtellot; The New Testament of the Jerusalem Bible; The Secular City by Harvey Cox; My Everyday Missal; Exploring Cuzco: Peru by Peter Frost; The Story Teller by Mario Vargas Llosa; Sappho: Lyrics; The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies by Arthur Knight; Adventures in Black Ops by Arthur Widder; Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much by Anne Wilson Schaef; Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Charism & Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church by Leonardo Boff; The Second Tree from the Corner by E. B. White; and more . . . .

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