coffee and ink

We were talking about Desert Island books on a list I'm on. The best responses, I think, were the people who said quite firmly they were planning to just avoid the whole scenario. Me, I started thinking, "But all my books will get wet when I drag them ashore!" and things just got more nerve-wracking from there. Nevertheless ... I had a bus trip this afternoon, I had a Palm Pilot, I had an idea, and now I have a list.

There are all these also-rans, mostly but not exclusively other books by the same authors I've got down. I'm still thinking about swapping out one of the Deans for Evangeline Walton's Island of the Mighty or Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint; if there were a Connie Willis collection that had *all* of "Blued Moon", "At the Rialto", and "Firewatch" that might do it.

Anyway. My philosophy of Desert Island Books is Comfort Reads, and Reads That Will Last Me A Good Long Time, which is how I ended up with Angela Carter's collected short stories instead of my favorite book by her, Nights at the Circus. More variety in the short stories.

God, getting my book collection down to 25. The mind shudders. Thank goodness for omnibus collections of series -- I managed to crowd in a few. The only real cheat is listing all of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series as one book. I guess if I had to get it down to one I'd pick A Doll's House or A Game of You, but instead I'm pretending very, very hard that it's all one massive book.

Anyhow:

My Desert Island Books

1 Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
2 Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels
3 Charlotte Bronte, Villette
4 Emma Bull, War for the Oaks
5 Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
6 A.S. Byatt, Possession
7 Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
8 C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen
9 John Crowley, Little, Big
10 Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills
11 Pamela Dean, Tam Lin
12 Neil Gaiman, Sandman
13 Greer Ilene Gilman, Moonwise
14 Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle
15 Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
16 Laura Kinsale, The Shadow & the Star
17 John Le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
18 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Niqht
19 Patricia McKillip, Riddle-Master
20 Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
21 Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
22 William Shakespeare, Hamlet

[2001.07.14: cofax pointed out that this should be a one-volume Complete Shakespeare, and then Jonquil pointed out that one should also take a solar-powered laptop with wireless connectivity. They are both, clearly, much more clever than I am. So it's good that I have the benefit of their advice, yes?]

23 Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
24 James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Warm Worlds & Otherwise
25 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own