Read/Reading/To Read

And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf, 
The accumulations that compose the self— 
Poem and history: for if we use
Words to maintain the actions that we choose, 
Our words, with slow defining influence, 
Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments.
- To Yvor Winters (Thom Gunn)

On Sunday Jacob and I listed the books we'd have on a shelf of books that were, in whatever ways books can be, our books. We shared obvious classics like the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare (although since I haven't actually read all of Shakespeare perhaps this was a pretentious falsehood), and still-classics-but-not-as-classic books like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Bleak House.

Since then I've tried to fill my mind's eye shelf with the books that have somehow composed me through the years (which I suppose I could call in a clunky-way my 'favourite' books, but I use the word 'favourite' so lavishly that I sometimes fear I've rubbed away it's meaning):

Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea by Michael Morpugo
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Everything is Illuminated and  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S Lewis

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I think it's strange that most (if not all) of these books are books I've read before my degree. Doing English doesn't take away the joy of reading (I think it adds to it) but the type of reading you do for a weekly essay doesn't lend itself very well to transcendental experience (although when writing an essay at 3.30am anything can feel like a transcendental experience, until you wake up the next day...)

I also think it's interesting that all of these are novels/series of novels. There are so many poems that I love and that I'd say have composed me but - they usually stand alone and not in a book, sometimes it's even just a few lines of a specific poem (I'm looking at you Mr J. Alfred. Prufrock) 

Books I'd love to read in future (and by future I mean this summer) - which might compose me, who knows?

Upstream by Mary Oliver
The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla
Autumn, and after that Winter, by Ali Smith
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (this was on Jacob's list)
Les Grandes Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera
Weight and The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson
Death and the King's Horsemen by Wole Soyinka (as recommended by Ying Ying)
Some of (or perhaps eventually all of?) Jane Austen
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell