Books for a guest room

 If I were dictator for a day, I’d pull a 5-page section of one of Michael Dirda’s books called “The Guest-Room Library,” declare it an essay and put it in a collection of readings for students.

I wish I’d seen this when I was in high school. It’s a delight.

Dirda thinks that every guest room ought to have a Bible, Shakespeare and a Jane Austen novel. It also ought to have a selection of books across many genres. He offers three recommendations in 10 categories:

• Mystery

• Horror and fantasy

• Humor

• Biography (including letters)

• Poetry

• Children’s classics

• Deep — but not too deep — thoughts

• Reference

• Journals and diaries

• Odds and ends

Since I know a certain romance novelist rather well, I noticed a lack among the genres. Romance is not for everyone, but neither are horror and fantasy and children’s classics. I like humor in essays and memoirs. But I can’t take the usual books of humor, even the ones he recommended. A night at a comedy club would be a long night for me.

But to each his own, which is why I like offering guests options in many categories.

I loved his recommendations for “deep — but not too deep — thoughts”: La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, Montaigne’s Essays and Guy Davenport’s Seven Greeks. Your guests should be spared Wittgenstein and Whitehead, I suppose. But anyone not exhausted by travels would find something to love in those three books.

I also like the suggestion about reference books. Surely I can’t be the only person in the world who likes to flip through a one-volume encyclopedia occasionally.

I love biographies, including collections of letters. I love journals and diaries. I’d read all he recommended and many others.

And we all should have a list of odds and ends — books that seem to defy category. And so I’ll be looking for The Literary Life by Robert Phelps and Peter Deana because I want to know what a cross between a scrapbook and an almanac looks like.

But the real pleasure of this essay was in poetry. He reminded me of the five-volume set Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson.

When I was a young man, I knew where this set was in the library and I never entered the library without stopping there, just to browse, trying to find something to take home in my notebook if not in my head.

I was nearer penniless than flush, and I promised myself that when I was able I’d buy that set for myself. And I simply forgot.

It’s time to visit the bookstore.

• Source: Michael Dirda, Book By Book; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005, pp. 40-44.