Top 20 Books I've Lost ... and Still Miss

Did I lend them to someone I've lost touch with? Leave them on a train, or on the table of a cafe? Did they tumble out of my bag once? Did I give them away, and then forgot? Are they in a box that I've forgotten somewhere, stacked carefully for a move that I made, but they didn't?

However these books escaped me -- it must have been many years ago for some of them -- I still feel their sharp-toothed gap on my shelves. I didn't even love them all, certainly not with my whole heart; some of them, though, I found provoking enough that I've wanted to return to them, but found they were disappeared. Given the penciled notes I made in many of them, the underlines, my thumbprints on the pages, buying a new copy feels crass. On this pleasing Saturday, where I've spent many hours reading (Carl Sagan, Norman Mailer), I want to sing a little hymn to The Lost Books. I hope they've found homes with readers who love them.

In no particular order (save the how they materialized in my memory):

• Seven Gothic Tales - Isak Dinesen
• Dorothy Day: Selected Writings - Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg
• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan (late 1960s edition)
• The Dead Fish Museum: Stories - Charles D'Ambrosio (hardcover, bought the day of my MFA graduation from the Warren Wilson College bookstore)
• Twenty Prose Poems - Charles Baudelaire
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
• Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus - Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Alfred A. Poulin in what appears to be an out of print edition, bilingual text, relied on for a bookshop in graduate school)
• feminism is for everybody: passionate politics - bell hooks
• Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre (an old New Directions edition)
• The Seven Storey Mountain - Thomas Merton
• The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
• Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future - Friedrich Nietzsche (from a college class on existentialism)
• Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley (from an independent study I did in art history in college, focusing on how artists were portrayed in modernist British literature, compared with how modernist artists were representing themselves)
• Collected Poems 1947-1980 - Allen Ginsberg (pored over deeply the long hot quiet summer of 2000; used as triggers for my own writing; the first "collected" anything I ever bought)
• Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose - Flannery O'Connor
• Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino (translated by William Weaver)
• Yerma - Federico Garcia Lorca (Spanish edition from my Hispanic drama literature class in college)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark (read while traveling across the ocean to Scotland; likely never came back)
• Nadja - André Breton (translated by Richard Howard)

Comments

[Stephen Mills]

Great little write up Anna; I have a long list as well. Was the Ginsberg anthology I got you in 2000 a replacement for this other one?

[Anna Clark]

It must have been! What a sweet second chapter (stanza? canto?).

Would love to hear tales about your lost books...

[Chris]

How do you remember who the translators were?

[Anna Clark]

In some cases, because I was very aware of the translator (I chose their particular version of it, and/or was attuned to their translation choices), and in others, like "Nadja," I looked it up based on the cover I remember having.