If you were left on a desert island and could have only 6 books with you, which books would you choose?

Obviously, that's assuming that all your primary needs have been satisfied, ie. food, etc.


For me it'd probably be (in no particular order)

1. The Master and Margarita by M.Bulgakov
2. Waiting for Godot by S. Beckett
3. Catch-22 by J. Heller
4. His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem
5. The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem


All of my books are fiction. If you want to add some non-fiction books, feel free (but let's not choose programming/technical manuals because there are no computers on your island and no chance of getting one)

• Life and Fate; Vasily Grossman
• Under the Frog; Tibor Fischer
• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Douglas Adams (there is an omnibus edition of several of the original books in one)
• Tractatus Logico-philosophicus; Ludwig Wittgenstein (there are some translation mistakes in the traditional interpretation, so I want the dual language version; maybe I'll make a better translation...or, maybe not)
• On Walden Pond; H D Thoreau
• and I'd quite like something by James Clerk Maxwell, I just haven't decided on whether I want the original papers, or whether I want a biography that covers both the life and the work in technical detail (just a biog without the technical stuff wouldn't be adequate)

and if you ask me tomorrow, that list will have changed - before I got to the end of the original post, I was going to go for 'DNS and Bind', but I understand your reasons for disallowing that. (Hey, you can get both The Prince and The Art of War by Niccolo Machiavelli as a single edition on the Kindle...does that mean, if I get a Kindle I can count them as one?)

Looks like I started counting at zero! That's an editing mistake. I'll drop the Thoreau.

4 Necroscope novels by Brian Lumney should cover it for me. I like to be entertained.
http://www.brianlumley.com/books/necroscope/


And one

Foxfire Novel
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385073534/

Normally you'd spot us two -- the King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare and then go for five from there. You don't so, I'll go with:

1. King James Bible
2. Complete works of Shakespeare
3. Complete works of Burns
4. Complete works of Wordsworth
5. Anglo-Saxon England by Frank Stenton

A lapsus there?

As for me, I guess it would be these:

• Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
• Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, by Edgar Allan Poe
• On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (the original canon, none of the cheap come-latelies)
The Complete Works of Shakespeare (I still haven't read Lear).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot.
The poems of e. e. cummings.
Bennett Cerf's Book of Atrocious Puns.
The Life of Samuel Johnson.

and, as a bonus,

The Boy Scout Handbook. I'll need it.

Thanks, sycamorex. That made me think!

I am somewhat surprised
just two books for me

Link 1
Link 2

or something similar

I was just waiting for one of THOSE answers. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough in my OP. This thread is not about finding the cleverest and quickest way of getting out of the island. The island context is just to help you identify the books that you value / enjoy / etc most.


I think I shall add: you don't want to escape from the island. In fact, that's the only land out there. You feel safe and comfortable there. You are the only person and quite happy that with you humankind will cease to exist, etc. Use your imagination

This is tricky, but I've chosen stuff I could read again and again...and again...etc. In no particular order:

Ulysses - James Joyce
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Breakfast Of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
The Complete Works Of Shakespeare
A History Of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell

Interesting, Brian: I also went for stuff that I could read again and again, and would be likely to lift my mood. And, when I clicked the send button, I was also thinking 'should have chosen something by Joyce' and I could have easily taken the History of Western Philosophy, had I thought of it. I did think of the Shakespeare and rejected it because I don't generally like reading plays. The chances of teaching a Meerkat (or whatever) to play Hamlet didn't seem worth following up on. Certainly not simples.

I did once start a book about Shakespeare and the man who wrote his plays (two senses), and I thought about taking that, hoping that, without a computer or an idiot-box, I might actually have time to finish it, but eventually came to the conclusion that having that and not having the Shakespeare itself could be a bit frustrating.

LOL. I thought I might go crazier than usual, and act out all the parts in the plays. Maybe write some spinoffs, like "Macbeth vs Richard III".

I wish I could choose Ulysses. Over the last 10 years I've tried to read it 2-3 times. Each time I gave up after under 100 pages... or perhaps that's exactly why I should choose it.

When it comes to Shakespeare, I have read around half of his plays and really enjoyed it but prefer novels. My master's thesis was devoted to the language of Shakespeare.

I started this thread to get some ideas for my further reading. Lost month I purchased the Kobo reader and must say I enjoy using it. I've been reading Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. It's rather long but engrossing. After that I'm thinking of getting into something more serious. Wittgenstein sounds interesting, especially due to a linguistic aspect of his theories.


... or combine Hamlet with Ulysses and see what happens

Thank you all. Keep it coming.

It's got to be something you can read again and again, and I think any multi-volume works would be cheating (as would a textbook on surviving on a desert island!) I quick choice off the top of my head:

New Testament
Oxford Book of English verse
Johnson: Essays
Le Guin: The Dispossessed
Bujold: A Civil Campaign

There is quite a long discussion about Hamlet between some of the characters in Ulysses. And reading Ulysses is child's play compared to Finnegans Wake - only managed a page or two of that.

Though I vary day by day a rough idea is:
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (or Snow Crash depending on mood).
The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (the full story in one volume).
Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs (interchangeable with the others in the "trilogy" depending on mood).
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (again, others in the series are interchangeable).
The Traveller by John Twelve Hawks.
Edit: Missed one: Cocaine Nights (or Super-Cannes) by J.G.Ballard.