I have been thinking about what books are in my personal canon and how they got there. When I wrote that post, I had some books in mind, but since then I’ve been second-guessing myself. I only read that book once – could it really have been that important to me? I felt inspired when I read that book in 2007, but it’s 2013 now – has my life truly been changed? This is why I generally try to avoid superlatives, lest I become completely paralyzed by the pressure to decide what books are BEST and what the word BEST means and excuse me I need to go write an academic paper on the topic before it makes any sense…

Books/labels/everything-else-in-life is more fluid than my perfectionist urges, and I try to lean into that fluidity when I can. Books can speak to you at one time in your life and then seem completely irrelevant or lame or poorly-written at another time. C’est la books.

But what about books you just plum forgot? I have also been thinking often about my Unread Library, probably because my writing & thinking space has a clear view of my blue bookshelf. When I look up from my typing or reading, there are half the books I own, all of them staring at me, most of them wondering if they will ever be read or if they will sit on that blue shelf, spines un-cracked, forever.

In the corner of the middle shelf is a book I have read, read more than once. A book I used to love but haven’t thought about in years and years and years.

Donna Tartt’s A Secret History was one of the first contemporary adult novels that really appealed to me. It is not quite a Secret YA novel, but it is set in a small private college, and definitely has a young person’s sensibility (please don’t call it New Adult). Protagonist Richard comes to college without expectations and a charismatic professor sucks him out of the sciences and into the highly useful field of “Classics.” The small group of students Richard studies with become his friends, even though they are all slightly off-center and hiding all sorts of dark secrets. Violent acts occur and Richard is caught in the middle of either a mystery or a cover-up, and life changes for everyone involved.

Senior-Year-in-High-School Jessica was all about it. When her English teacher challenged her reading choices yet again (“You need to read the CLASSICS!”) this was the first book she stepped up to the plate for, quoting reviews from the back of the book, arguing for its literary merit, its acceptance into the modern canon, that it was a damn good book and not at all fluffy or YA and everything else she found unacceptable for me, her sometimes-pet student.

It was maybe my first literary argument, maybe helping to unlock that Passionate!About!Books! thing that makes up so much of my identity. I read it two or three times as a teenager, called it my favorite book. And now it sits in the corner of my bookshelf, taking up space.

I could give it a re-read. I could donate it to a teenager who might like it. Or I could let it sit there forever, its spine reminding me of Senior-Year-in-High-School Jessica, whoever she was, and the books she liked an awful lot.