But the logistics of moving frighten me. I've moved before and I know what a hassle it is. I need a car and a way to transport my bikes. Money is also an issue. To distract myself from these and other considerations, I've begun to populate an empty bookshelf with the choicest titles from my extensive collection that I absolutely couldn't do without wherever my job hunt takes me. So, what books will I take with me to my "desert island?"
There are a few titles that come instantly to mind.
- Herodotus, Histories
- Stephen Bloom, Postville
- Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor
- Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems
- Arthur Clarke, 2001 A Space Odyssey
- R.D. Laing, The Divided Self
- Richard White, The Organic Machine
When someone asks me what book (or album) I'd take to a desert island, my answer, I've realized, has much to do with what I want the asker to hear as my own opinion. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Virginia Woolf: Will I take any of her books with me? What about Russian and graphic novels? Gödel, Escher, Bach? Nietzsche? Or does including these books unite me with my past interests more than with what I'm likely to read?
Perhaps a more complete list (added to the list above) would look more like this:
- Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf
- Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts; The Years; Moments of Being
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
- John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor; Lost in the Funhouse
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, The Idiot
- Roald Dahl, Roald Dahl Omnibus
- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
- Neil Gaiman, Sandman
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
- Associated Press, AP Stylebook 2009
There. I've more than doubled the number of books I'll be taking with me, along with, like, all my clothes, electronic gadgetry, bikes, tools, etc. It remains, considering the hundreds of books I've read and have stowed in my room, a tight list. I hope to keep it tight.
In the meantime, I'd be interested in finding out what books you, dear reader, would take to your own desert island.
Gotta dig your choice of The AP Style book - and specifically the 2009 version to boot (no stupid revision of "Web site"). In that vein, I'd have to put Steve Berry's "Watchdog Journalism: The Art of Investigative Reporting" on my list, alongside "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," and Tim O'brien's "Tomcat in Love" - a book I think you would really like. And if weight isn't an issue, I might add "War and Peace," and Les Mis. The latter of which I would bring only because I haven't read it, and when you're alone on a desert aisle, there'd by now excuses not to.
ReplyDeleteKeep me updated on the job stuff. Looking forward to hearing where you end up. And just saying, if you moved to D.C., where there are journalism jobs galore, you wouldn't need a car. But that would probably even trump Iowa in differentness-from-Idaho.
Jim, thanks for the comment. It sounds like you're getting your money's worth out of D.C.––hey, if worse comes to worse, I may join you there, do some political reporting.
ReplyDeleteYou'll notice I've included "War and Peace" in the second of my lists, though it's easy to miss. Part of me is glad you didn't say "Anna Karenina," since the best parts of the former are, I think, better than the best parts of the latter. "Les Miserables" is also an extremely attractive choice. I may end up reading it sometime because you talk so much about it!