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The If on a winter's night a traveler categories might help.

Books You've Been Planning to Read [to the end] for Ages: Turn of the Screw, Lost Illusions, Tales of Jacob, Doctor Faustus, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Daniel Deronda, The Man Without Qualities, Kim, Lord Jim, Demons, The Idiot, Invisible Man, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Don Quixote, Lucien Leuwen, Letting Go, Clarel, Mardi, The Confidence Man, Pierre, Economy of the Unlost, Eros the Bittersweet, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Lost Steps, The Betrothed, The Radetzky March, Urn Burial, The Garden of Cyrus, The Bostonians, Canzoniere, On Things, The Lusiads, The Relic, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Tom Jones, Orlando Furioso, Tristram Shandy, Blow Up & Other Stories, Cards of Identity, Red Cavalry, Gargantua & Pantagruel, Lolita, Pale Fire, A Lost Lady, Valery's and Mallarme's poems in French, The Essays of Elia, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics, White Noise, Hundred Years of Solitude, something by Ursula K. Le Guin, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thucydides, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Pindar's Odes, Rousseau's Confessions, Augustine's Confessions, Hume's Treatise, something by Kierkegaard, Tractatus Philosophicus, The Genealogy of Morals, The World As Will & Idea, The Excursion, Sphere, Sordello

Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Reread [last finished 1993-2001]: If on a winter's night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, As I Lay Dying, The Scarlet Letter, The Trial, Silas Marner, Women in Love, The Magic Mountain, Swann's Way, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Faerie Queene, Elective Affinities, Werther, Faust 2, Brand, Emperor and Galilean, Love's Labor's Lost, The Tempest, Antony & Cleopatra, Macbeth, Richard 2, Comedy of Errors, Laon & Cythna, The Cenci, The Prelude, Nightmare Abbey, St. Mawr, Tolstoy's short novels

Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them: I'll count books I didn't quite finish here--Ulysses, Murphy, Franklin's Autobiography--and ones I was loving but was somehow ripped away from--The Waves, Under Western Eyes, Confessions of Zeno, The Mill on the Floss, Resurrection--or that I've read around in extensively with pleasure but never tackled completely, consecutively--Walden, Leaves of Grass, The Republic

New Books Whose Author or Subject Appeals To You: Four Freedoms, Conversation Hearts, In Other Words, Voyage/Shipwreck/Salvage

Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified [with which I'll include some of the easily justified]: The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony, Julian, Creation, Godel Escher Bach, Adventures of Maqroll, Taras Bulba, Tree of Smoke, Face of Another, Homage to a Lame Wolf, Invention of Morel


Adding a Non-Calvinic category:

Books Recommended By People Who Would Know: [Julie] Blindness, All the Names, The Cave, Kafka on the Shore, Grapes of Wrath, Of Human Bondage; [nightspore] Name of the World, Northanger Abbey, Watt, Independent People, Life: A User's Manual, Munro's Stories, Merrill's Poems, Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis, By Night in Chile, Your Face Tomorrow; [grashupfer] Wittgenstein's Mistress, Infinite Jest, The Names, Tender Is the Night, Emerson's Journals; [andalus] Preambles & Other Poems; [fluxbox] Austerlitz; [my father] Jurgen, Chaucer's Troilus in the original

(no subject)

The Other World, Popa


My grandmother puts cupcakes
With lit candles on floating planks

Whispers to them messages
For the dead men and women of our blood
And sends them down the river Karaš

The planks slide down the black water
The little candles struggle through the dusk
And disappear around the turn of the river

Grandmother announces
That they have happily reached
The other world

I have already been there once
To set traps for birds

I didn't know of course
It was my ancestors I was hunting
Among the blossoming willows

(no subject)

Not sure I understand Popa's "Wolf's Earth" sequence. Sometimes what I want a poem to mean blocks me from its meaning.