Nightstand Reads: Novelist Jim Lynch shares books that made a difference.

If you’re like us, one of the first things you start looking over when you visit someone’s house is their books. Local author Jim Lynch obliges us with a peek at his own bookcase of favorites. Lynch is the celebrated author of two acclaimed novels, The Highest Tide (winner of the 2006 Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award) and Border Songs (now in production as a TV serial). His newest title, Truth Like the Sun, is set in Seattle circa 1962 and 2001.

Instead of yakking about my cluttered nightstand, I’d rather offer you a glance inside the tidy bookcase I recently put together in the living room next to the fireplace.

It’s only big enough for 75 books, but it holds the greatest hits of my reading life. Plucked from my basement library, these books aren’t necessarily the best I’ve read, but they are the stories that jolted or inspired me, the ones that shaped me as a reader and a writer.

The top shelf starts with Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Based on outrageous Louisiana governor Huey Long, this novel dazzled me with its blend of politics and poetry. After finishing it on a night train hurtling through Thailand more than 20 years ago, I immediately started scribbling down the idea for the first novel I ever tried to write.

Nearby, on this same shelf, are the two Northwest novels that rocked me as a teenager — Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Farther down this same row is Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which slapped me with its first page and then had me scrambling to put it in the hands of college friends who needed to read it. And further down this same row is Colum McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin, which startled me recently with how well it captured New York in a sprawling emotional story built around a 1974 tightrope stunt between the Twin Towers.

Gathering all these books together in one compact bookcase felt like a reunion. Hey, there’s Ironweed! I hadn’t even seen the cover of William Kennedy’s novel in decades but his story about some irresistible bums in Albany sticks with me like it’s my own. And there’s Styron’s long-lost but indelible Sophie’s Choice. The movie was so powerful that people forget the book was even stronger.

I have kept in touch with many of these books through the years, such as The Great Gatsby, which I cracked again the other night just to savor its final six pages. I’ve reopened Pete Dexter’s The Paperboy several times to study the rhythm of his dialogue. And I’m looking forward to taking another read through the daring opening to Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto.

They’re all here together now. And browsing back in time on the bottom shelf, I see Being There, Jerzy Kosinski’s brilliant satire, which felt so illicit and provocative to this 14-year-old reader. And back even further, there’s Conan. Yes, I loved that pulp fiction series, and I still believe that Robert E. Howard was a gifted vivid writer. And before him, there was Wilson Rawls and his story of an Ozarks boy and his two hunting dogs. Where the Red Fern Grows was the last book that was ever read aloud to me. I considered leaving it out of this bookcase, but it belongs too.

Jim Lynch will be reading from and signing copies of his new novel, Truth Like the Sun, at the Elliott Bay Book Company this Thursday, April 12 at 7 p.m.