The
8 books thread recently got me thinking along similar but slightly different lines: in the spirit of
Desert Island Discs, what would be the books that I would want to have with me as a castaway on a desert island, the bare minimum of absolutely essential tomes that I wouldn't want to do without?
I don't think and don't claim these are books that everybody
has to read or books that you have to read to consider yourself intelligent or anything as snottily prescriptive as that; it's just a list of (some of) those books which have meant and mean the most to me and from which I've continually drawn inspiration and, maybe, wisdom; the minimal books I'd want to keep me going on my island.
This needless to say is a first draft
Like
Desert Island Discs I’m going to take the complete works of Shakespeare and The Bible (King James/Authorized Version only) as a given — as far as the Bible’s concerned there’s some great human wisdom in it (predominantly in the Old Testament buried of course amongst a great deal of tedious dross) expressed in majestic English. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer as well, also for the English rather than the contents.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — in some ways a one-stop compendium of Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas, hugely readable (to me at any rate). I found him early and have never ceased to regard Freddy the 'Tache as one of the greatest, most powerful, subtlest and most profound minds this planet has ever seen, with something original and brilliant to say on just about every subject to which he bent his pen and whose major works I re-read every eighteen months to two years or so. I think this is probably the one of Nietzsche’s works that I would choose if I really had to whittle it down to just the one, but if it was option I’d have the whole lot (perhaps minus
The Birth of Tragedy, his earliest and least representative book, and
Ecce Homo which is a sort of intellectual memoir).
Arthur Schopenhauer:
Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin title) — while Schopenhauer’s main work was the one translated into English as
The World As Will and Representation or
The World as Will and Idea, a hard-going book that he published early in life and carried on refining and revising for the rest of his days, this consists of selections from the
Parerga und Paralipomena, his shorter, punchier pieces, beautifully clear, readable everyday philosophy — religion (he didn’t like it), suffering (he was against it), animals (he loved them), women (not a fan) and so forth.
Seneca:
Letters From a Stoic (Penguin title) — thoughtful wisdom for life from an acute and humane Roman Stoic thinker.
Marcus Aurelius:
Meditations — see as for Seneca, also a Stoic. Elegant, noble ideas from a great mind.
Meditations has always been the English title: originally it was simply a commonplace book in which Marcus jotted down random thoughts and observations and which he titled
To Himself.
The three-volume boxed-set of the
Dhammapada, the
Bhagavad Gita and the
Upanishads translated by Eknath Easwaran — because I’ve always been interested in Eastern philosophies.
A Thomas Paine Reader (Penguin title) — or any other compendium which contains at least
The Rights of Man,
Common Sense and the first part of
The Age of Reason. A, to me, unarguable defence of liberty, democracy and free-thinking.
John Stuart Mill:
On Liberty — the ‘Bible’ of classical liberalism (libertarianism in the now old-fashioned British sense, before the colonials hijacked it to mean something considerably different) and a defence of the supremacy of individual rights.
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels:
The Communist Manifesto — the shortest exposition of anti-capitalist ideas and a defence of the working class. Volume One of
Capital as well if we’re going to be thorough.
Richard Dawkins:
The Blind Watchmaker — that clichéd thing, a genuinely life-changing book, the book that made evolution ‘click’ for me, the book that explained how evolution actually works. Of all Dawkins’s works the single greatest is I think
The Extended Phenotype but that’s a quite difficult, pretty technical, hard-going book that straddles the boundary between being published as popular science but also aimed at professionals. Of his layman-aimed works TBW remains I think the greatest. I did think about going back to source and including Darwin’s
Origin of Species, which is a world-changing book, a beautiful read in often lovely, stately prose; but evolution is by definition a constantly-changing field and I think it's as well to stay relatively current.
John Keats:
Collected Letters — W. H. Auden wondered if Keats was a greater letter writer even than he was a poet. I wonder that too. I think he may very well have been.
The Oxford Book of English Verse — rather than a great many different Collected Poems by different poets, may as well have a shallow but broad anthology covering the best part of a thousand years of English poetry. That said I couldn’t and want to do without the collected poems of
at least A. E. Housman; Edward Thomas; Philip Larkin as well.
The
Oxford English Dictionary — the huge and extremely heavy one-volume full micrograph edition if need be (plus a very good magnifying glass, in that case). Still the most expensive single book I’ve ever bought, albeit fifteen-odd years ago when it was a steal at £60.00. Great for reference, terrible for curling up with for an evening's browsing with a nice bottle of something - the
Shorter OED is good for that
The
Encyclopedia Brittanica — the last print version was published in 2010; from then on it’s been and will be available only in digital format, so while I’d personally rather have the print version (all thirty-two beautiful volumes ...), I suppose I’d make do with the DVD-ROM and a decent laptop at a pinch if I really had to.
I know that fiction is notable by its absence but then I’ve always been much more of a one for non-fiction. If I had the choice I’d have to throw in obvious classics such as
War and Peace (to my great surprise, not a dull read at all but an absolute page-turner; it’s just very, very, very, very, very long, and I only managed to get about three-quarters of the way through);
Great Expectations (Dickens’s finest, in my view);
The Great Gatsby; and to my mind what is the greatest work of fiction ever created by any human mind, James Joyce’s
Ulysses albeit only in the edition I have which is the annotated student’s editions which more than doubles the actual length of the novel itself with notes which explain exactly what Joyce was about and making explicit his plan for the book. For sheer sentimental value I’d also throw in the books which were dearly loved by me and tremendously important when I was a kid, books I still re-read regularly now — I mean children’s classics like
The Wind in the Willows, like
Treasure Island and (more recent) Penelope Lively’s
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe.
