My Desert Island Library
November 15, 2007
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. Malone.
Thomas Bernhard. Woodcutters.
Michel Butor. Passing Time.
Robert Coover. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
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.
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.) [...]