I have been keeping a book lifelist for about ten years now. What's online is only the read and unread; what is in what should be a database but is instead only Microsoft Excel has a lot more, not necessarily pointful, data. I have combed the internet for titles and synopses of long-forgotten books of my childhood, as if I needed more evidence that actually I read about a dozen books 20 times rather than, say, a lot of books.
Every time I think I have everything important, another title or several occur to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time. The Secret Language came up recently, and yeah, I read it and liked it well enough to recall it from a synopsis, but it wasn't ground-breaking. Then today, on my bike, out of the blue, came a title: Tread Softly. The author turned out to be Corinne Gerson, and the Library of Congress synopsis reads, "A young girl tries to cope with the loss of her parents by inventing an imaginary family"; those data are on Amazon. What flooded back to me on their own were older brother Buck and younger sister...Gabby? and the trip to Maine, and the other babysitter, and the weird painting, and the two friends, and the actual brother, the grandparents, and their aphorisms. My sister always wanted an older brother, which is as opposite to a younger sister as a sibling can be.
In the six years between its publication and my departing my library for college, I must have reread the book a dozen times. Or more. Yet it lay unrecollected, unthought of--except for flashes when I read Yeats--for 20 years. How does that happen?
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.