With no small amount of trepidation, I lay open here the first page of my diary — high-­schoolish stabs at intellectualism, fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations and all. After many failed adolescent attempts at keeping a journal, the summer after my junior year in high school, I finally found a format I could adhere to: Never mind describing the back-and-lack-of-forths of unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends. I decided to list the books I read instead.

And I’ve stuck with this Book of Books, or Bob, as I’ve come to call it, ever since. Were my house to burst suddenly into flames, I would bypass the laptop and photo albums and even, God forgive me, my children’s artwork in order to rescue Bob, the record of every book I’ve read or didn’t finish reading since the summer of 1988.

The impetus for starting my book of books had less to do with recording my life than with documenting what my embarrassingly faulty memory failed to hold on to. I often can’t remember if I’ve read a book or not, nor do I remember the barest substance of those I have. A former beau once demanded to know the hero’s name in “Of Human Bondage” six months after I’d read it. “His object of desire’s name was Mildred,” I answered miserably. Though I’d spent more than 600 pages and nearly a month with the character, I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. (It’s Philip, if you must know.)

Bob may not reveal the identities of individual characters — all that sort of thing is still lost — but it does show how one book led to another or prompted a total shift in genre. It records whether I’ve read an author before, and if so, when. Why had I left him, and what drew me back? Over the years, it’s become in certain ways even more of a personal record than a diary might be, not about what happened but about how what happened made me think, drove my interests, shaped my ideas.