Things I Wish I'd Done #1

I wish that I had kept a list of all the books I've read--from the very beginning. Actually, I wish my parents had started it for me. They could have listed all the books they read to me, before I even learned how to read, including all the Little Golden Books (especially the one about George the pig who ate so many doughnuts that he blew up). I remember that Mom read me Lois Lensky's Strawberry Girl, probably more than once. I think it was a favorite of hers. There were many more, I know, selected from the cool interior of the county's traveling Bookmobile, a pleasant place to linger on a hot summer day, but the titles escape me now.

If I'd kept such a list, I would have put check marks by the books I read more than once--one check for each reading. Maybe even with dates. What a life journal that would be! I could trace myself from childhood (Dr. Seuss, Beverly Cleary) to preteen (Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mysteries, Hardy Boys, too, alongside the Junior Biographies of Great Americans series). I'd even be brave enough to list the books my teenage self was afraid for my parents to know I was reading, like Go Ask Alice or Judy Blume's Forever.

I'd list everything I read in school, the books recommended by friends, the ones my aunt Peggy shared with me, the great books that changed me forever, and even ones that I didn't like but made myself finish anyway.

I'd list my Now That You're Pregnant book and the ever-popular Baby Names A-Z. I wouldn't omit the romance novels I've read, or the Self-Help books, or the true crime dramas. I'd list Shakespeare and Dickens and the Bronte sisters right in the middle of books about dinosaurs that I read to my little boys, the Chronicles of Narnia and Gary Paulsen's Hatchet, and 1000 Dresses, especially for my daughter.

I'd list Mere Christianity and The DaVinci Code, Two from Galilee and The Handmaid's Tale. All Jane Austen would be there, some Thomas Hardy, some Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Love, Pray and Richard Wright's Native Son. I'd list Gone with the Wind and The Bluest Eye, Nabakov's Lolita, Dracula, and Charlotte's Web.

There's no possible way I could reconstruct the list now, although I really wish I could. I guess I'll have to be satisfied with the only existing history of the books I've read--the person I've become.