Cast ashore on the proverbial desert island, I would want to have these books with me. They are ones I could read and re-read for a very long time. The only rule: one book per author.
Walter Abish. How German Is It.
J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun.
John Banville. The Book of Evidence.
Samuel Beckett. Molloy.
Thomas Bernhard. Woodcutters.
Michel Butor. Passing Time.
Robert Coover. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
Julien Gracq. The Narrow Waters.
Graham Greene. The Heart of the Matter.
Peter Handke. The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.
Franz Kafka. The Castle.
William Maxwell. The Chateau.
Herman Melville. Moby-Dick.
Alberto Moravia. Contempt.
Harry Mulisch. The Assault.
Robert Musil. The Man Without Qualities.
Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita.
Peter Nadas. A Book of Memories.
Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet.
Robert Pinget. Passacaglia.
Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea.
W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn.
Susan Sontag. The Volcano Lover.
Ronald Sukenick. Blown Away.
Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway.
Marguerite Yourcenar. Memoirs of Hadrian.
(Subject to change on pure whim.)
January 16, 2008 at 11:29 am
Now this is an excellent list, I say in near ignorance (I’ve read 8 of them). But another 7 or 8 are in my “I know I need to read this someday” category.
August 17, 2008 at 8:21 pm
[...] I confess to having been back from California for a week and I still don’t feel very organized. We ate well, walked far, and soaked up the fog. We also spent a few hours in City Lights Books and went out with a small bag of books. The only volume I’ve finished so far is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mishima: A Vision of the Void, originally written in 1980. Although I have a great interest in Japanese literature, Mishima had always been on the fringe of my understanding. Yourcenar’s small book helped open a door for me. (By the way, I’ve just added her book Memoirs of Hadrian to My Desert Island Library.) [...]
September 28, 2010 at 11:31 am
I suppose you could always fry bananas with the Ballard and make room for something good like Knut Hamsun’s Hunger instead. Nice list apart from that clanger!
September 28, 2010 at 8:43 pm
Charlie, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger was one of my college favorites, and I read it several times. But that was the early 70s. I’ll have to revisit this. Thanks for the reminder of a title I’d lost track of.
September 29, 2010 at 12:42 pm
I thought it would be up your street. I was also going to add Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi which I read recently and thought fabulous. It’s funny how you can be reminded of author’s / books long forgotten. Your list reminded me that I had read and enjoyed a load of Moravia stories when I was at Uni trying to be moody and existential.
September 29, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Woops. Make that ‘authors / books’ without the ‘duh’ apostrophe.
December 21, 2011 at 12:29 pm
I’d thrown in Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in the 6-volume Modern Library edition, and I would also add the most essential desert island book, How to Get Off a Desert Island.
January 2, 2012 at 4:25 pm
Wait a sec…Malone by Beckett? No such novel. Don’t you mean Malone Dies? Or were you thinking of Molloy? Or Murphy? Doesn’t really matter, since they’re all .
January 2, 2012 at 4:28 pm
Appropriately, the final word was truncated from my previous comment. The word was “Unnamable.” Somewhere, Samuel Beckett is laughing what’s left of his arse off.
January 2, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Molloy. I still remember the shiver of recognition when I first read Molloy (and the rest of Beckett’s trilogy) some forty years ago. Thanks for catching this conflation of Molloy and Malone Dies… I’ve changed the listing accordingly.
February 5, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Great list – I’d second the additions of Joyce & Proust and maybe suggest Perec’s Life and Maxwell’s JR. Much as I love the Yourcenar, I think I’d have to opt for her later novel, The Abyss.