In response to a discussion over at a forum I frequent, here’s a list of the 10 books I would bring with me to a desert island (assuming I don’t need practical books such as the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook to teach me how to make fire without matches):
- Shakespeare - Complete Works
- James Joyce - Ulysses
- Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
- Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
- Salman Rushdie - Midnight’s Children
- Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
- Monty Python - The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words, Volume 1
- Lenny Bruce - How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
- Paul Krassner - Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut
Which is not necessarily a list of what I would think are the 10 greatest works of literature of all time - after all, on an island one needs to balance art and the need to laugh. Books I would miss, in no real order:
- Thomas Pynchon - V
- Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow
- Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
- Raymond Carver - Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
- T.S. Eliot - Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950
- Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
- Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London
- Anais Nin - Delta of Venus
- Luc Sante - Low Life
- Jane Austen - Emma
- Julian Barnes - A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
- Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
- Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch
- Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- Kenneth T. Jackson - Crabgrass Frontier
- Richard Farina - Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
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