'A Reassuring Survivor'

“As for a book to mark the settled sobriety of my advanced years, I keep Boswell’s Life of Johnson close by. Its praise of steady judgment, as well as its moral force, make it a reassuring survivor.” Here’s a reader/writer worth paying attention to. William M. Chace is a retired professor of English and university president of the old school, the sort who taught the books they loved and often reread. A reader sent me a link to a recent essay, “My Books,” published by Chace in Commonweal. The premise is a familiar one: after a life of accumulating books, what to keep? What to sell or give away? His choices overlap with mine, though not entirely. He’ll keep Shakespeare and Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide but also, sadly, The Catcher in the Rye and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Never have I encountered a reader whose tastes and fallibilities were identical to mine, though Chace’s are close. “As for all the other books,” he asks, “why keep them? Because some were written by friends or…