Not long ago, I unearthed a notebook I had long ago misplaced: a small blue ledger in which, for a period of about four years, I recorded the title of each book I was reading as I finished it.
The record begins in mid-July of 1983, around the outset of the summer break before my penultimate year of high school, and the first book listed is “Dr. Zhivago,” by Boris Pasternak. 
I don’t remember reading that book, or why I thought that the reading of it merited the instigation of a list. Likely, I had a sense that Russian literature was important, but nobody had yet pointed me in the direction of Tolstoy. Next up was Maxim Gorky, “The Life of a Useless Man.” (Ditto.) Before the month was out, I had torn through “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in a single day—I certainly remember that experience—and had also dispatched with “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
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