The Book Ark Top 34

On July 30, 2000, I created a list of books purchased at Book Ark, a great subterranean store on West 81st Street. Years later, we would move nearby, only to see that it was closing. They were selling everything at discount. They were even selling the shelving. I believe my last purchase was a Japanese novel, Inoue's THE COUNTERFEITER.

Without further ado—here are the books purchased as of 30vii0, in the order they sprang to mind. I am now 34 years old and I don't think there's a clunker in the bunch. Even the titles I haven't finished (or, really, read at all) are the sort I'd bring to a desert island. These days when they strand you they let you bring one book for every year you've lived.

If I ever teach a class, let this be the syllabus.

1. The Decameron, Boccaccio
2. The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium and Other Novels, Harry Mathews
3. The Enormous Room, e.e. cummings
4. Selected Writings of Sir Thomas Browne
5. A Question of Upbringing, Anthony Powell
6. A Buyer's Market, Anthony Powell
7. The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck
8. The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges
9. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Kawabata
10. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki
11. Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, P.D. Ouspensky
12. The Life of the White Ant, Maeterlinck
13. The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
14. Pornografia, Witold Gombrowicz
15. Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz
16. Hugging the Shore, John Updike
17. Clouds of Witness, Dorothy L. Sayers
18. Tout Ubu, Alfred Jarry
19. Mount Analogue, René Daumal
20. Yale: A Short History, George Pierson
21. Two book catalogues from Goodspeed's bookstore, Boston
22. The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison
23. Mistress of Mistresses, E.R. Eddison
24. A Fish Dinner in Memiston, E.R. Eddison
25. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Edgar Allan Poe
26. Icefields, Thomas Wharton
27. A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov (transl. Nabokov; cover art by Edward Gorey)
28. Forgers, Dealers, Experts
29. The Valley of Bones, Anthony Powell
30. The Soldier's Art, Anthony Powell
31. The Military Philosophers, Anthony Powell
32. The Narrow Corner, W. Somerset Maugham
33. My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather
34. Atlantis, Ignatius Donnelly