Published: June 01. 2010 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

I keep a stack of books that makes me nervous.

I buy these books — Robert Bolaño’s “2666,” Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood,” David Foster Wallace’s “Infinte Jest” — because somebody I trust wants me to, sometimes a friend or a student, sometimes another writer I’ve never met. I buy them with the best intentions, and as a reader not easily intimidated. But for one reason or another, these are books with reputations like Hollywood starlets, for temper tantrums, lost weekends, books that don’t really care how you want it done, because they’ve got a plan of their own.

And I put them off as long as I can.

In the introduction to “Nightwood,” a 1936 modernist novel set in Paris and Berlin between the wars, about a complicated tangle of relationships between three women and a doctor who dresses like one, T. S. Eliot confesses that it took him some time to come to his full appreciation of this book. Twelve years later, he amends that preface to say (and I paraphrase here) that even though it makes him look dim, he still thinks it’s good advice to the first-time reader. This is hard. This takes time. And this guy wrote “The Wasteland.”

Everybody has the bad experience in their educations, the book that just sailed over their heads, the Joyce, the Danish translation, the novel that was really philosophy, and sort of depressing philosophy at that. But too, everybody has that experience of having tried to read something at the wrong time in your life, coming back to it later — once, say, you’ve had children or lost a parent, hate your job or traveled to India — and suddenly, as though a switch has been flipped, E.M. Forester is brilliantly insightful about the state of the modern marriage. Timing, in love of all kinds, is everything.

I go away with my family in the summer for six weeks. I pack for those weeks with a sense of imagining my vacation days: XM radio paraphernalia for listening to baseball; certain cookbooks so as to take advantage of the fish market and the farm stand; sundresses and sweaters for cooler nights on the beach; and books I’ve been meaning to read. It’s packing for my interior life; it requires guesswork as to this issue of timing. I take one book for every week I’ll be gone (as I love the bookstore and library of my destination plenty) and I take at least one book from my stack of tough cookies.

Why keep going back? Why spoil a good thing, like vacation, with something you have to make yourself do?

There is always only the one answer: It’s worth it. In her introduction to Eliot’s introduction, Jeanette Winterson writes that reading “Nightwood” “is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.”

This is my third try at “Nightwood.” Wish me luck.