The Bookshelf

I have way too many books.  Shelves and shelves of them and still I use the library every week.  But I have one bookshelf, the one closest to my writing desk, that gets preferential treatment.  Only the books that I love best--a very select few--are housed there.  These are the books I come back to again and again.  Dog-eared, their covers often worn soft from use, they are books I turn to not only out of love but for study.  Some I read parts of virtually every week.  They are joined by the books I need for research at that particular moment, but that purpose is different from the use I make of these--which is something more like carrying photos of the ones you love.  A few titles change from time to time.  More will be added.  But there are a few that will always have a place on that shelf.  Among them:

• The Collected Poems of Rilke
• The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
• Joe by Larry Brown
• Fay by Larry Brown
• Olive Kittridge by Elizabeth Stout
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
• American Primitive by Mary Oliver
• The Paradise of Bombs by Scott Russell Sanders

Those are some of mine.  What's on your shelf?