Desert Island Books

During a recent rerun of The Office (currently the funniest show on TV, period), I watched as Jim asked his other coworkers, gathered in the parking lot after a workplace fire, what books they would take with them if they were to be stranded on a desert island for a long, long time.

What an excellent question! If I were to be exiled, a la Napoleon on St. Helena, and had the option to take along a handful of hand-picked books to spend the rest of my life with, what would they be? Hmmmm. Okay, immediately these books come to mind:

1. The Bible
2. The Lord of the Rings (plus The Hobbit, plus The Silmarillion)
3. It
4. Watership Down

Right there is about 4,000 pages of reading. I could probably cycle through those four in about a year of desert island reading, easily. After a decade I’d start reciting the pages and the chapters before I actually glanced at them. So I’d need more material.

But why did those four jump out at me? I think it’s because they mean so much to me. All of them, to greater and lesser degrees, profoundly influenced me, shaped me, and helped me in various ways. They were all strong emotional books for me. I read Watership Down around 1978, the Tolkien books between 1980 and 1981, It in 1986, and the Bible, for the first time cover-to-cover, in 1992. Aside from another book which shall remain nameless I read in 1997, there’s been quite the dry spell in world-changing books despite an uppage in the volume of tomes read.

Anyway, I’d certainly need to take more with me to that desert island. Let’s say I’m allowed, due to space reasons, four more. What would they be? No doubt books of hefty length, books I could either learn and feed my intellect and / or entertain me incredibly by pulling me in to new worlds. What books could do this?

I tried to brainstorm a couple and was completely unsuccessful. It would probably be a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment thing for most of the decisions. But I quickly came up with four broad categories:

1. A massive collection of Poetry
2. A text on Physics by one of the young tigers of the 1920s
3. A comprehensive History of, say, the Middle Ages, or the Roman Empire, or America, or the Church, or …
4. Something substantial by an SF Grandmaster, like the Robot stories by Asimov, or one of Heinlein’s adult works, or an anthology of Bradbury stories, or …

Oh, and I forgot. Any one stranded on a desert island would need a survival manual! How else could I figure out how to make a radio out of a coconut?