Don't all of us have a book like this on our shelves?: Richard Powers's story

Strangely, I was very moved by Richard Powers's story in the current New Yorker, Let the Measures Tell (or something like that) - I think of Powers as a cerebral writer; his novels always seem to be intelligent but daunting (I've read only a couple), like giant ice-capped mountains, you're glad they exist but you don't really want to scale them. Maybe he's well-suited to the short story, in that the form it itself is so much less intimidating to the reader, we're willing to take on a greater challenge for a shorter go. This one, with its elusive title, is about an American student in England who buys a used paperback novel by a once-renowned, now obscure British novelist in the social-realist tradition. The unprepossessing theme/structure of this story: the student (a woman, you, story in 2nd person) keeps this book throughout her life, and closely watches as the author's reputation waxes and wanes, the book in a way becomes a monitor for her own life and career, through grad school, early years teaching, failed marriage, law school, remarriage, kids late and precocious, reading with kids, book club, final illness - throughout it all, the book is a fetish or a totem for her: a remembrance of her early days as a young woman when the world was all before her, she imagined the book was a great treasure, either an undiscovered great novelist or a rare book (at one point she thinks it may be inscribed by Churchill), and as her life changes, its disappointments and losses, the book reflects this in complex ways. I would never have thought a story like this could work. But then again: don't all of us (English majors, I mean) have books, or a book, on our shelves like this, a book that's not so much a novel as a totem, a relic from youth?