You can only save one book...

At the end of a novel I shall not name (for spoiler reasons), it is revealed that a group of people have dedicated themselves to saving literature for future generations by (each member) memorizing a work.

If something were to happen to all the literature in the world, what book would you choose to save for humanity (preferably something you enjoy but isn't just "crack" fiction and has some literary merit)?

I think I'd save Les Mis or Count of Monte Cristo (though no way in hell am I memorizing either!!!).

If I could have some drawing skills implanted to go with the text in my head, I'll go with V for Vendetta. If not, it'll have to be Macbeth for me (although that's a bit of a cheat - I know most of that one already). :)

Wow, it's hard to imagine with the fame of the work you're not citing that people would expect not to know the ending before reading it. Kind of like not knowing that Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the play.

I'm not so good at memorizing any more but I'd like to do The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.

Kind of like not knowing that Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the play.

Oh c'mon. Spoiler alert please.

To Kill a Mockingbird. I memorized quite a bit of that when I was a teenager and could remember things.

I would save Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. It is so imaginative and fun. It has some really cool things in it that would make it relatively easy to memorize and retell.

I would save Atlas Shrugged however if we're talking an end of the world situation How Things Work would be a practical choice enabling you to rebuild society.

@aulsmith
I read like nobody's business (286 books last year), yet I had never known the ending before actually reading it. Granted, I had never seen the movie (I prefer to see the movie after reading the book), but I've never heard it mentioned anywhere before reading it, or since (for that matter).

>8 benuathanasia: Agreed, I certainly didn't know until I read it a few mos ago. I do not at all believe it's comparable to knowing Romeo & Juliet or the like. Everyone knows of the book's existence and "importance," so to speak, but I knew pretty much nothing about it before cracking it open, and I've been an avid reader/booklover all my life.

Common Sense it is a very important work and, more important for my memory, only 46 pages long.

@PolymathicMonkey
Same. I always had a general "feel" for what it was about, but, other than its basic premise (which is a real-world issue), I've never really seen it referenced a whole lot in other literature or popular mediums.

Put me down for Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck. It would be a pleasure and an honor.

Wait! Romeo and Juliet die? When did that happen?

>13 suitable1: It was in Hamlet, of course. ;)

@HenriMoreaux
After reading your second part, I had a strange vision of a potential future:

Speaker: Ok, we've saved all of the world's great literature. Let's lock it up where it can be safe until we can figure out how to make a printing press and create copies and redistribute it...Does anyone know how to make a five-pin tumbler lock?
Anybody?
No?
Damn...

#14 - oh, thanks. I've only gotten as far as Macbeth.

15> Exactly! Everyone will be nursing their cultural icons and what not in their dirt shacks whilst I'd be living it up in a functional house with water and power thanks to How Things Work ;)

I think I'd want to do something more culturally-aware, or.... something, not just a novel based on it's literary value. So, as a help and a huge "you are not alone" to those many many teenagers with these issues, I'd have to say either Second Star to the Right or Crosses. Probably Crosses, if I can only choose one, since it gives a bit of a rougher look at the extreme side of the consequences.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding because it describes what life is like without civilization, when life is reduced to the will to power.

>19 barney67:
...just as long as you remember that short-sighted people, contrary to what Golding says, are no use for starting fires.

I was going to say Shakespeare's Complete Works, but that would be too hard to memorize…

Treasure Island but I couldn't memorise that, either, although it is pretty dramatic.

Then there's Moby-Dick, but who wants to memorize the Cetology chapter?

Only one book! The Once and Future King by T. H White

>24 suitable1: Oh yes! And then I'll invite you over evenings and you can recite it.

Montaigne's essays. That would be a good few pounds off everyone's backpack in the wilderness.

>26 defaults:
Probably not a bad idea. If we already have Shakespeare and someone else brings along Don Quixote, then we'll be in a pretty good position to ensure that we'll be able to create a new world literature within two or three centuries. I don't think I could manage to memorise Cervantes, though. Maybe I could have a go at Prufrock and other poems? Or A Shropshire lad? — Eliot seems a bit more appropriate to the postapocalyptic world, but Housman would be more fun...

24 - I'm never sure whether to think of that as one book or four. I think it was originally four and got mushed together into one, correct? Kinda the opposite of LotR which was one and became three (or if you read the book divisions, six, I think).

The idea of what constitutes a "book" or a "work" always throws me off...especially for the book challenges. I'm having that issue with my copy of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, right now. If it were all poems and short stories, I'd have no issue thinking of it as "one book" but he just had to write The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a novel in its own right, and throw me for a loop.

#28 - I've always considered it as one book. I think that's the way it always published these days.

I can't promise to memorise it, but I would save The Mists of Avalon.