The one you never got over

People ask how we chose the books, and the honest answer is that we did not choose books. We did not start with a list of the hundred greatest novels or a syllabus anyone should feel guilty about. We started with readers, and we asked each one a single question: what is the book that changed your life? Not the one you admire, or teach, or think a serious person ought to have read. The one you never got over.

The answers came back with ages attached, very young ages, and that told us something. Salman Rushdie was sixteen and Candide was the set text in French class. John Banville was twelve, in a provincial Irish town, and his older sister handed him Dubliners. Clancy Martin was fifteen, in a family that never said the word love, and fell for a girl (very, very hard) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the same season. Roxane Gay has read The Age of Innocence thirty times. Garth Greenwell expects to go on reading The Golden Bowl for the rest of his life without reaching the bottom of it. Nobody used the word important, as in “this book is SO important.” What they said, in one form or another, was that they never got over it, and then a couple of them went quiet for a second, the way you do when you are seeing something that can’t quite be expressed.

That silence is what we were after. Mine was Walden. I was fourteen, in central Pennsylvania, and a Latin teacher named Mr. Eames put the book in my hands and then drove me to Concord and walked me around the pond. I can tell you what Thoreau argues. I have been doing it for a living most of my adult life. What I cannot tell you is what happened to me on the far side of the pond that afternoon, except that I got back to the car a different person and made Mr. Eames a promise about the rest of my life.