The books ought to arrive in about two weeks now, and though there are things I could be working on (a short story, the next novel, learning how to run the website) I’ve been reading instead, and being generally lazy. So lazy that I’m going to punt on today’s entry, and just put down a list of books I’d take to a desert island. People do tend to ask me what my favorite books are, and in one of the Tom Stoppard plays I’ve just read, there’s a very erudite playwright who in Act I has been invited to talk on the radio about the musical albums he would take to a desert island. He’s excited but nervous because, snobbishly erudite as he is when it comes to writing, what he likes in music is lovely fluff like ‘Da Doo Ron Ron.’
If I could have twelve novels, they might be the following:
Ulysses, James Joyce
Deutschstunde (The German Lesson), Siegfried Lenz
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Ansichten eines Clowns (Opinions of a Clown), Heinrich Böll
The Sun Also Rises, Earnest Hemingway
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin
Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
The Spire, William Golding
Die Blendung (Auto-de-Fe), Elias Canetti
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
I’m re-reading Catch-22 just now. The first time through it I was ten or eleven, and it was an eye-opener in more ways than one.
The prospect of only twelve books, and all novels, makes me awfully nervous, so maybe if I could have a second dozen, from the realms of autobiography and poetry, they might be these:
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Wars I Have Seen, Gertrude Stein
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Eines Arbeiters Weltreise (A Worker’s World Tour), Fritz Kummer
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
complete works of Shakespeare
“ “ “ T. S. Eliot
“ “ “ W. B. Yeats
If you have your own list, I’d love to see it. It’s always interesting to see what people are reading. And if you send me a list, tell me what you look for in a book. Why is it that you like to read?