Dear Reader, I am awash in melancholy.

In a few short weeks I will be off to Quebec, where everything is in French and the grizzly bears drift by menacingly on the ice floes and even the babies smoke. This is bad, dear Reader, but there is worse to come: I will have to abandon my beloved job paddling through the shallows of the library system, skimming the light green scum of literature from the surface of the still waters of democracy as I go floating by, and I fear, oh how I fear, that my reading will suffer.

Dear Reader, do you believe in fairies? I'd rather you didn't. But it would be helpful, now, if you would recall the scene in Peter Pan where Tinkerbell is languishing away because no-one believes in her, and all the little children have to clap out a testimonial to their belief in fairies in order to save her life. Children are suckers, aren't they? I know I was. In any case, I am about to request something similar of you. But soft -

I am going to steal a conceit from Italo Calvino, because I believe that if we all stole our conceits from Calvino a little more often, the world would be a far more interesting place. On the third page of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller", he describes a visit to a bookstore thusly:

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:"

Pay close attention now, dear Reader. Here is where I steal the conceit and make the request. Below I will list certain books, classified in categories suggested by Calvino. Your side of the bargain is to choose one of the books, in one of the categories, and read it. And if every one of you does this, it may have the same vivifying effect on me that the clapping of tiny hands had on dear Tinkerbell, and awaken me from my icy English-language- book-deprived slumber so that I can adjust to my new life of boozing, sawing blocks of ice and fighting with the police. (Conceit follows)

the Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages:
Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, by Marcel Proust
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment:
(Oh, Reader, do you know the feeling that you're going to die before you ever learn any of the things that you want to learn? Not because you expect to die any time soon, for God's sake you're not even thirty, and women in your family have a proud tradition of lasting well into their nineties, but because there is a vast world out there full of details, footnotes, digressions, whole disciplines that you can never hope to swallow, people who devote a long and happy lifetime to the study of egrets, or robots, or time, or the ineffable flowering of the infinite heart of God, or merchant banking, of course you know that the thing is to choose, that everything follows from that, but how can you possibly choose any one thing when the enormous and beautiful variety of everything in the whole world stimulates a terrible thirst that will not be quenched, you are adrift in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, drinking seawater by the bucketful, and the more you drink the thirstier you get, I know, I know, Jesus, Wendy, try to relax...)
Books on chess strategy
Books on how to build a foot-pedal for a potter's wheel
Books on basic mechanical principles, motors, robotics, water circulation systems, clockwork
Books with step-by-step instructions for Russian ikon painting
Books on brain chemistry, mental illness and learning disorders
Books on how to build a theremin
Books on hypnosis
Books on mysterious phenomena and massive popular delusions

the Books You'll Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case:
Partridge's Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, from the work of Eric Partridge (and I always thought that "to bagpipe" meant something like "to skirl"! How wrong I was!)
The Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer:
The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami
Anything by Raymond Chandler
Any of Eric Ambler's early stuff
The White Bone, by Barbara Gowdy (I like elephants)

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified:
Ordinary Russians, by Barry Broadfoot
How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton (in fact, I'm reading this right now - but that's another story)
Cement, by Nikolai Gladkov
Other People's Trades, by Primo Levi
The Analects, by Confucius
How to Find Lost Objects, by Professor Solomon

Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Re-read:
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, by Kenzaburo Oe
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Connor

Books Which You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them:
(I blush to admit it) Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. (Now, to be fair, I did study a few choice passages way back when in Lit. Crit., passages which both reflected and moulded my whole internal construction of the world, and I have intended passionately to follow up on them ever since, but have put it off in the same way you always put off throwing that enormous party or taking off on that endless road trip, the one with the Winnebago and the sleeping outside on the edge of the desert and the twenty-five-cent breakfasts in cheerful sleepy truck stops, the one with no bad moods or petty squabbles or fear of dying or getting lost or losing everything, just perpetual sunrises over Monument Valley and long dark twisting roads through the Blue Mountains with Coletrane playing so, so softly on the tapedeck, you know that road trip, everybody does, but who ever takes it? But I will read Walter Benjamin again, I will, I will...)