I grew up in a house where the only books were a dictionary, a Bible, and a motley assortment of Reader’s Digest condensed novels picked up at yard sales by my mother, who didn’t believe in spending a dollar when she could spend a dime. I rarely saw books in the homes of my friends. Their parents, like my mother and father, had come of age during the Great Depression and World War II, hard times that taught them to distinguish between necessities and luxuries. Until I was in high school, I never met a person who considered the buying of books a necessity, like the buying of groceries or gasoline.

Fortunately, in 1915 a group of civic-minded women in Ravenna, Ohio, decided their town needed a library, not the kind that charged a fee but a public library where anybody, even a backroads kid without a penny in his pocket, could browse the shelves and borrow armloads of books for free. I began visiting that library before I started first grade, a country kid but already an avid reader thanks to lessons from my older sister, and I continued visiting until the summer after I graduated from high school, when my family moved to Louisiana. Over those dozen years, I often checked out particular books multiple times, returning to them for the stories or knowledge or sheer delight they gave me. If the book I was hungry for happened to be missing from the shelf because someone else had borrowed it, I would go away disappointed, as if a friend I had hoped to see was not at home.

Until I was sixteen, it did not occur to me that one might create a personal library, a collection of favorite books kept close at hand, always available to provide inspiration, ideas, entertainment, or simple good company. Then at the end of my junior year in high school, my English teacher invited his students to come for tea at his home. It was a revelation to meet his wife and young daughter, to think of our teacher as having a life outside of school; it was a revelation to sip hot tea from a cup rather than slurp iced tea from a glass, and to eat a jam-smeared pancake called a crumpet instead of a cookie; but the greatest revelation was to see one entire wall of the living room lined with shelves full of books. When my teacher noticed me gawking, he told me I was welcome to go have a look.

There were volumes in German and French as well as English, a mix of paperbacks and cloth editions, mostly literature and philosophy, all arranged alphabetically by the authors’ surnames. The names I recall now are those of writers whose work I had begun to read at the urging of my teacher—James Baldwin, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Gustav Flaubert, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf, among others. What I remember most vividly, decades after surveying those crowded shelves, is the thrill of imagining I might one day gather my own collection of books, reliable companions, like friends who always answer a knock at their door.

The summer following that afternoon tea, I earned money as an apprentice carpenter for a local builder. As soon as I had saved up a few dollars, I bought cheap paperback editions of The Sound and the Fury, Notes of a Native Son, and The Brothers Karamazov, the beginnings of what I hoped would become my private library. Those books rest beside me now as I write, their spines broken and mended with tape, their pages yellowed and marked in pencil with comments and underlining. At the bottom of the last page in each book I recorded the date and location of my first reading, and then all the subsequent readings, as I returned to them repeatedly over the years.

Most books don’t reward a second reading, let alone a third or fourth. They deliver all their secrets and pleasures the first time through. That’s no argument against reading them once, of course, for the entertainment or information they provide, and I still borrow armloads of one-time-through books from the public library. But some books are inexhaustible, yielding new discoveries every time they’re opened. Which books those might be will differ from reader to reader. The ones I have found worth revisiting most often are a treasured minority among the two thousand or so volumes that now line the walls of my house.

I’m in the midst of rereading one of those inexhaustible books, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. It’s a cloth edition, the first hardcover I ever bought. I laid out the $4.25, more than a week’s spending money in my freshman year of college, after hearing a recording of the Welsh poet’s rhapsodic chanting of his work. The book lies open before me now to a poem that begins with these haunting lines:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

When I first encountered that poem, I was in my own green age, just eighteen, full of desire, youth’s energy rising in me like maple sap in spring. I return to it now in my gray age, still charged with curiosity and yearning, but with joints aching and energy waning.

In those few lines, Dylan Thomas found a fresh way of expressing a familiar truth. The power that gives rise to us eventually reclaims us, as it does the flower and tree, the starfish and stars, the clouds and constellations. Whether we call it nature or Tao or God, or by any other name, this power is Destroyer as well as Creator. Long after the poet’s death, his words remain fresh, preserved as ink marks on paper. What a marvelous invention, this storehouse of surprises we call a book. It requires no electricity, never runs down, and freely offers its gifts to anyone who looks inside.