Ronan Devlin keeps a list, on a single sheet of unlined paper folded inside his copy of Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger, of the books he would, if forced, reduce his library to. There are forty-one titles on the list. The list has been in roughly its present form since 2019.
He calls it, privately, his personal canon. He does not particularly like the phrase, and he uses it without the capital letters.
This essay, written for the magazine in late May, is about why such a list exists, why it should be small, and what the test is by which a book gets on it.
The argument is not that everyone should keep such a list. Devlin worked sixteen years at an independent bookshop in Cork, and he knows readers who would find the practice slightly absurd. He has no quarrel with them.
What he wants to argue for is the question the list asks, which is more useful than the list itself.
The question is this. If one's house caught fire, and one had time to carry out one box of books, which books would be in the box.
This is a melodramatic way of phrasing a serious question, and Devlin is mildly embarrassed by the melodrama. But the question forces the reader to distinguish, in a way that nothing else does, between the books one likes and the books one cannot do without.
The two categories are not the same. Devlin likes, for example, the novels of Anne Enright. He has read every one of them with great pleasure. He would not, in the fire, take any of them. They are not what he would do without.
He would take, among the forty-one, the Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney's North, and John McGahern's Amongst Women, and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and a battered Penguin Middlemarch, and the Helen Vendler edition of Yeats's collected poems, and three or four other books which he has been carrying around since university.
He would also take, oddly to him, a small 1969 paperback of Brian Friel's Lovers, which has no particular literary distinction but which was a gift from his grandfather, and which is one of those books one cannot, in the relevant sense, do without.
This last book points to something important about the list. Not every book on it is a great book. Some of them are great books. Some of them are personally great books, which is not the same thing.
The list is not a recommendation. It is a self-portrait. It tells the reader what kind of reader she has actually been.
Devlin's argument is that this self-portrait is worth the trouble of drawing, even if one never shows it to anyone, because it forces a kind of honesty about one's own reading that is otherwise easy to avoid.
It is easy to admire a book one has been told to admire. It is harder, and more useful, to identify the books that have, by some private measure, made the reader who she is.
He proposes a small test, which can be applied to any candidate for the list. The test has three parts.
First, the book must have been read at least twice. A book read once is a book one has not yet finished evaluating. The second reading is the first real one.
Second, the book must have produced, on at least one occasion, a sentence the reader has quoted in conversation more than a year after finishing it. This is a low bar, but it is a real one. A book one cannot quote is a book one has not, in the relevant sense, absorbed.
Third, the reader must be able to imagine recommending the book to a specific person — not a category of reader, but a named person — and being grateful, later, for having done so. A book one would recommend to no one in particular is a book that has not yet found its place in one's own life.
Forty-one books survive this test for Devlin. He suspects, for most serious readers, the number is between twenty and a hundred.
The list is not fixed. He has added two books in the past five years and removed three. The removals were harder than the additions, and one of them — a Walker Percy novel he loved at twenty-two and now finds, at forty-nine, slightly thin — surprised him.
Lists, he writes, are diagnostic instruments. The personal canon is a diagnostic instrument trained on the reader herself, and the small surprises it produces are, in his experience, the most useful information any reader can have about her own life with books.
He keeps his list folded inside the Kavanagh because the Kavanagh, in his case, has been on it the longest, and because the paper is a useful bookmark, and because he likes the small ceremony of unfolding it once a year on his birthday and reading it through.
He has not, so far, added or removed anything on a birthday. The birthday is for reading the list, not for revising it. The revisions happen in the slow weather of an ordinary reading life.