I started keeping lists of the books I’d read when I was fifteen. I don’t know how many people used to do this, it may be a habit peculiar to myself, but the list has come to comprise a catalogue of sorts as time has passed and hundreds of titles become thousands and memory runs into itself. I stopped doing this between eighteen and twenty-three for reasons forgotten and probably never very clear. Now, of course, there are reading list websites, like Shelfari and Goodreads, so I suppose it’s more common than I once imagined.
That first list, though, held surprises, one in particular that has become part of an on-going internal debate. …