I find it most interesting but completely unpredictable which of your posts will spur the most comments. Gay rights–2, Deserted Island reading list–11 and counting. Shows you where our priorities lie.

PBS has broadcast top notch serialised versions of both the Elliot books mentioned above.

As for the bible, my son’s rock band, The Red Eyed Ravens, hopes to someday have a second gig. Our United Church looks a likely candidate so they figure they have to write a song appropriate for a service but as they have an Atheist, a Protestant, a lapsed Catholic and a Conservative Jew (recently switched from Orthodox because of the conflict between the rules governing girls and his testosterone poisoning) they didn’t want something overtly Christian with “too much Jesus talk.” So, I introduced my son to the Songs of Solomon. BIG surprise. We’ll see if anything comes of it but, yup, the Bible is full of a variety of stuff that could keep one interested for quite a while, believer or not. (I also would love to see what happens to the blue rinse mafia in church, if the band puts one of those songs into a service.)

Keep up the blogging.

Lorraine

I read it at…oh…12. Didn’t care for it.

Have since read Pilgrim’s Progress (god help me), HATED it, and learned that it was mentioned in Little Women, which I didn’t remember but now I don’t like it more.

Excellent call on the whiskey.

d

I chose Little Women because it was the first novel I ever read. It was basically the book that made me a book worm; the point at which my journey started. That’s the first reason why it will always stay with me.

I think I (and probably other people as well) may also have chosen it for the same reasons I’d take a Bible: it’s timeless, and it always has new things to say. I think the variety of its characters allows most people to feel identified with at least one. Same thing with what they go through.

Mila.-

Middlemarch, I have not yet read. I did, however, read Daniel Deronda and fell in LOVE with Eliot. And Middlemarch is her classic.

Mila,

Thanks for reminding me of the Barnes. I’ve been trying to remember the name of that book for years. :)

Why do people keep choosing Little Women?

d

With the single volume restriction I thought about saying I wanted a loaded e-reader and nine blank notebooks. But that’s just silly, an e-reader won’t last more than a few years even if I had a way to recharge it. But with a capacity of several thousand books it’s the only library you can lift without dynamite.

Does Shakespeare fit in a single volume? I’d expect his collection to span at least a couple of books.

If I can have a collection that fits in one volume, I’d like to amend my list to replace the Norton with a collection of her Witch World novels.

I’d never heard of Middlemarch until now. (Apparently American education has failed me again.) Is that something you’d read for enjoyment, or is it something to be studied?

Dave

Collected works of Oscar Wilde
Rapture, by Carol Ann Duffy
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, by Julian Barnes
Catholic Bible
Collected short stories by Jorge Luis Borges
Cien Años de Soledad, by Gabriel García Márquez (well… any book by him, to be honest)
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
Shakespeare’s sonnets
Cuentos de la selva, by Horacio Quiroga

All of that, and a bottle of whiskey.

Sorry ’bout that.

I love the music idea.

Here was my list:

1. Collected works of Shakespeare
2. Bible (NSRV Study Bible with copious footnotes)
3. Works of Homer
4. Milton’s Paradise Lost
5. Collection of the world’s greatest poetry
6. Eliot’s Middlemarch
7. Gulliver’s Travels
8. Dante’s Divine Comedy
9. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
10. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

After I wrote this list, I was told that Gibbon is several volumes, so I need to replace that one.

d