In the months after his suicide I became obsessed by the idea that I now had to read every book in the world, because my father was no longer there to assign me some and not others. This prospect sent my head spinning. Sometimes, lying on my bed, I would become aware of my thoughts as if I were reading them in a book and then imagine (I was taking a typing class at school) my fingers hitting the keys that spelled out my ideas as I thought them.

I needed order, and it came from an unexpected place -- the list of titles on the back of the Cliffs Notes guide to "Julius Caesar," which I'd bought for advice in staging a backyard theatrical. This black-and-yellow friend of delinquent college students became my highest authority on great literature, and the number of books that had to be read suddenly dwindled to about two hundred: "Ivanhoe," for example, and "Black Like Me" (but not "Remembrance of Things Past"). I sat down and assigned myself four listed titles a month, calculating that by the age of eighteen I would have read everything worth reading.

Almost immediately I fell behind (the Aeneid was heavy going), but the list itself wasn't discredited by this failure -- only I was. My father's death had warped my relation to books -- a love affair ever since "Where the Wild Things Are," when I walked around the house for days believing I was Max -- into something systematic and compulsory. I anesthetized the part of myself that was alive to literature's capacity for shock, delight, terror. The simple telling of a story no longer held any value; now I had to master each book, which meant wrestling its theme down to a single sentence. This sentence was often buried somewhere in the text, and I would spend tormented hours digging it up -- unless it was available on the Modern Library jacket, which, for example, told me that the theme of "Crime and Punishment" is that crime is its own punishment. Once I had the theme under control, I would underline the title on the Cliffs Notes list and move on.

It was as if, by plowing through the world's great literature, I could keep the world itself at bay and stop the spinning in my head.

Ideally, reading means getting lost. The process of surrendering and then recovering the self might be the essence of growing up -- being exposed to an alien world and, instead of being broken down and destroyed, absorbing it, making it your own. But that year, the thought of losing myself was quite real and frightening. I might plunge into the depths of a book and never come back up. "If phantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful," Freud wrote, "the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis or psychosis." He added, ominously, "Here a broad by-path branches off into pathology."

So I read and read, checking off titles and hoarding themes, without letting a germ enter my bloodstream.

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