A woman pointed to the bookshelves in my study (which do not contain all my books) and asked which one was my favorite. She was very intense and repeated the question several times.

Initially, I was a little stumped. Or, perhaps, floored.

My first reaction was to stumble through a ‘desert island five’ scenario, mentioning my copy of the King James Bible, among others.

Somewhere along the way, I saw my copy of the Walter Kaufmann edited and translated Basic Writings of Nietzsche. And I pulled it out. That was it. This was the same copy I bought back in high school, the brown paper sleeve worn by use and too many moving days.

The Kaufmann translations have received some criticism for neutering Nietzsche. I couldn’t say; I don’t read German. But weren’t we all breastfed on his Nietzsche, for good or ill?

The selections are a little idiosyncratic, I admit. The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals make sense to me. Selecting The Case of Wagner and Ecce Homo over The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ makes rather less sense. And I won’t pretend to know what to do with Thus Spake Zarathustra.

But, my Nietzsche is Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. And like any good rebellious youth, Nietzsche held a special place on my youthful shelf, alongside Salinger, Marx, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg.

These days, Kerouac and Salinger are almost never pulled from the shelf to be read. Marx and Burroughs, occasionally. Ginsberg, too. Only Nietzsche, among those, can be said to be still perused with any frequency.

So, that’s my book. The Basic Writings of Nietzsche.