If only 10 books existed in the universe, which 10 would you want them to be?

I love lists. I love seeing other reader's favorite/essential/could-not-live-without lists especially, so we can compare, and then hopefully, respectfully, playfully rag on each other's selections. Like, how I could pick Swan Song below, over, say, Gravity's Rainbow or The Brother's Karamazov? What was I thinking not including even one Russian?

List more than 10 if you like. Or, I should request: List at least ten. Here's mine, not necessarily in order, I could not live without (this list is subject to revision):

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
The Lord of the Rings
Women And Men by Joseph McElroy
The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

These aren't necessarily my favorites, but they're looooooooooonnnnnnng, and if I can only have 10, I'm going to maximize the page count of my ten.

hahaha
good thinking, but I would ditch the LOTR. Puhlease......

I would want the 10 books in the universe to be books written by me. Think of the royalties....

But, since I love lists too, and this has been torturing me all day thanks Enrique grr, here, after lengthy and herring fuelled consideration, and after intense research in my library, are my "10 books I couldn't live without".

The Iliad Richmond Lattimore with all my marginalia
The Penguin Book of English Verse
Collected Works of Shakespeare Norton, with all my notes
Collected Poems of Auden not fussy but it must be all the verse
War and Peace
Bleak House
The Pickwick Papers
The Double and Notes from Underground bit sneaky, but the two novels are published as one book
Gravity's Rainbow
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr naturally.

ETA: Oh Dammit, there's no Henry James. *gnashing his teeth Murr stumbles back into the library clutching his martini glass and sloshing vodka all over the parquet*

How dare you summarily and arbitrarily dis Tolkien! I loved him when I was 15 - and those are some sweet sentimental memories, you nasty bad alley cat! I'll not stand for it (nor shit for it either)- I meant to say "I'll not sit for it," damnit! I'm such a screwup sometimes! That's embarassing!

You got me all verbally constipated with your rude "puh-leeez!" Murr. You better stop it! You're more orc than cat aren't you, yes? Auden? Auden over Milton, Pound, Rilke, Rimbaud, Baudelaire?
How could you? How? How?!

Ooooohhhhh may the Salon Smack Fest 2009 ensue and escalate all the more!

Venus and the Voters by Gwyn Thomas
Gormanghast by Mervyn Peake
Porius by John Cowper Powys
Essays by Virginia Woolf
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
The Self-Condemned by Wyndham Lewis
The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies
Charles Dickens by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Complete Shakespeare Variorum Ed.

Now that's more like it! None of that Tolkien crap here. All highbrow stuff. What is Venus and the Voters? never heard of it.

enrique, sir, you are an ignorant pudding. I spit on your list, and spurn it with my heel, my tail raised high, whiskers bristling. 'Zounds, sir, 'zounds!

I haven't heard of the vast majority of these titles, and I'm finding it difficult to come up with 3 titles that I would be willing to have as the whole sum of the world's library.

I almost want to say the bible, but to leave people with the bible and nothing to contest it does not seem like a responsible decision at all.

I suppose my list would look something like...
Crito and Apology of Socrates (Or I'll cheat like everyone else and simply say "The Complete Dialogues"!)
Language in Thought and Action by Hayakawa
Essay on Man by Alexander Pope
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
The Analects of Confucius
The Bible
Ficciones by Borges
The Plague by Camus
The Collective Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, or maybe the Screwtape Letters.

Now, if I were to take this all much less literally and simply chose the books that I personally could not live without the list would look much different.

Kokoro, Ficciones, The Plague, and Language in Thought and Action would remain, and added to that list I would have to keep

The Good Earth by Buck
The Count of Monte Cristo By Dumas
Dealing with Dragons by Wrede (tease me about it and I'll fight you!)
100 Years of Solitude by Marquez
Lolita by Nabokov
The Phantom of the Opera by Leroux (Gets me every time. *sniffle*)
Watchmen by Moore

My exposure to literature is still very small. I've read a lot, but can count the titles that have floored me on... well, I just counted them. (And Dealing with Dragons and Phantom didn't so much floor me as much as they are the literary blankies that I come back to year after year.)

I love these lists. Especially like looking at other's lists.

Mine:

Complete Works Shakespeare
Arabian Nights Burton
You Bright and Risen Angels
The Plague
Herodotus Histories
The World's Great Speeches
Robinson Crusoe
Pale Fire
Sea of Fertility Cycle
The World's Great Religions: An Anthology of Sacred Texts

Wow, ten sure came fast!

lol,

Magic Mountain by Mann ( still the best I ever read ) I read nearly every day some pages of it...
Moby Dick Melville : The essence of who we are and what we are.
Salammbo Flaubert : And seeing the fire in the eyes of my father when reading this to me at age 10. ( Love you for it Dad )
Voyage to the end of the night ( ? ) by Celine. I read it and felt like I was struck by a sledgehammer.
Hommes ivres de Dieu : I understood what Christianity was all about.
Histories Herodotus : How old is our world !
Ulysses Joyce : He did to literature what stravinsky did for music and Picasso for painting ! Marvel at the Artist at work....
Odysseia Homeros : what a hero !!!! Named my oldest boy Ulysses immediately after that
Magical Prague by Rippolini : The city that lives in my heart
Dialogue with Werner Herzog : The man I wanted to be

OK, I will try to do this, but really it is an unfair hypothetical.

100 Years of Solitude
LOTR (sorry snobs, but it's part of my youth and I can't give it up)
Ulysses
The Odyssey
The Once and Future King
The Quran (Yusuf Ali trans. with original Arabic side by side)
the 1001 Nights (in Arabic, with the Burton complete translation, OK this is maybe cheating)
Recherche du Temps Perdu (because if I could only bring 10 I would bring one that I had not already read and that would take me a while!)
The Sufis by Idries Shah
Norton 3rd Anthology of Poetry in English

#9: You may already be familiar with this - if not hurry over!

http://www.wernerherzblog.com/

VENUS AND THE VOTERS is a fine novel by Gwyn Thomas. A scintillating stylist and a first-rate storyteller. THE WORLD CANNOT HEAR YOU is another example of G.T.'s talents.

#6...I spit in your vodka!

Then I take your list and use it to scoop you up off the sidewalk after I run you over http://www.pbase.com/gero/image/26676

that's a good kittydeadcat Murr!

sometimes a list is just a list, already.

Except when it's a cigar.

14...I completely agree! Some people just don't know when to stop, do they? Hint hint, Enrique. LT is home to cat lovers everywhere - I think you know that! Shame on you!

Grow up already! And yeah, I red flagged that. You mess with cats you're messin' with me, Mister! Deal with it.

I shall treat Enrique's post with the contempt it deserves from a cat of my distinction. I again lift my tail in your direction, sir, and administer the ancient feline curse:

May you be haunted by the stench of stale cat piss throughout all eternity.

Pah!

Mackie, that is some list! Anna, we have missed you. How is the new job? Thenaughtyhottie, you can stop stroking your pussy now, dear, and show us your list.

Anna, I was once talking with someone that the Yusuf Ali translation was the only translation I should go for if I read the Koran. I haven't gotten to it yet, but since you mentioned him in particular, would you second that opinion?

17...I can't believe you'd speak to a grandmother (albeit, granted, a grandmother recently featured on the cover of PlayGramma) like that!

I couldn't live without these:

Dianetics
The Joy of Sex
Fear of Flying
The World According to Garp
Steroids
120 Days in Sodom
Dogs Rule!
See, I Told You So
Gone With The Broken Wind
sTORI Telling

MWAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

funny stuff.

18: Yusuf Abdallah Ali was a Sufi so the original translation, made I believe in the 30's, was very good. It contains lots of footnotes with Sufi explanations of Koranic verses. However, the Saudis have adopted it for use in their proselytizing activities and have removed a lot of Sufic stuff from it, so if you are looking for one, look for a used edition that does not have Saudi royalty mentioned in the dedication. As a student of Sufism I prefer this translation. Arberry is another version that is Sufic but I find it rather ponderous. I have both (though I have a recent version of Yusuf Ali and am still looking for an older one).

Versions that I would stay away from: Pickthall is too prosaic, and the version entitled "Noble Quran" with two translators whose names I can't remember is a very Saudi version with extremely Wahhabi ideas sprinkled throughout (and integrated into the text, rather than footnoted, so it can be very misleading for a student who does not read Arabic).

The Collected Essays Journalism and letters, George Orwell
The Complete Stories,Franz Kafka
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
In Search of Lost Time, Proust
The Dragon and other stories, Yevgeny Zamyatin
We, Zamyatin
The Illustrated History of the Countryside, Oliver Rackham
The Natural History of Selbourne, Gilbert White
The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
The Divine Comedy Dante
The Emigrants by Sebald
Bleak House by Dickens
The Brothers Karamozov by Dostoevsky
Macbeth Shakespeare
Notes From the Underground Dostoevsky
War and Peace by Tolstoy
Watership Down by Richard Adams

Although I guess for the valuable impact they had I think I'd also go for Plato's republic and David Hume's Inquiry of Human Understanding.
Although in this word there wouldn't be the Franklin books to teach me to read so all of the above would be useless. But if all but 10 were destroyed I'd want those 10.

Hi unlucky!

Welcome to the salon. Happy to have you here!

Funny you list The White Castle. That's the only Pamuk I've ever read - and I'm still scratching my head tyring to figure out where or when or even how that narrator changed identities. Have you ever been able to pinpoint the spot in the novel when the narrator assumes the other's identity - was it a captor narrator who assumes his captive identity? Been awhile. I kept going back and forth repeatedly reading that thing, trying to figure it out - what an ingenious little book!

Thank you Enrique.
I think part of what I love most about that book is that it does have some ambiguity. The issue of identity (I guess that isn't really an issue per se, but any issue involving identity) is never going to have a clear answer. Everyone is going to have some similarities and differences between them and any other given person. Even within an individual there is going to be some variation, which I guess is what this book is about.

Even from the very beginning on a superficial level there identities are already being redefined. As the story unfolds they both impose on the other ones identity. At some points Hoja bears more of a resemblance to an earlier version of the narrator then the narrator bears to himself. I don't think, even at the end when they have officially switched places, that they have completely assumed each others identity. I don't mean to make it sound like the change is only superficial, it obviously runs deeper than that but I think part of the point of White Castle is that identity can never be fully defined.

I guess a lot of that is intuitive. I'm fairly ignorant compared to a lot of people in this group, I haven't read nearly as much as most other people here have, possibly because of my age or because of other distractions of life that keep me back from reading, so I guess I might not be getting the finer points of books I read, like when the change actually takes place. I don't know, a lot of what I just wrote is probably a muddled rant of nothing, or something really obvious but that's what I got out of that book. Or maybe, being younger and angsty and not wanting to admit that I'm like everybody else while at the same time feeling alienated I just wanted to get that message and so I'm putting meaning where the author didn't intend.
Either way, that's what I got out of the book.

Or maybe, being younger and angsty and not wanting to admit that I'm like everybody else while at the same time feeling alienated

Couldn't have said it better myself, unlucky, except for the "young" part, unless one considers middle age young. ;-)

That's a great post on a complex book. No muddledness, IMO. You could make a good review out of that post, actually.

Thanks for such a thorough response!

yes, I agree. Hang on to those intuitive responses. They are usually what the writer wants to create in the reader and no less valuable than more erudite and 'academic' responses. You express yourself well.

I have not yet read any Pamuk, but he does really intrigue me. I'm glad to see so much Dostoevsky and Dickens on your list, Unlucky.

hey unlucky, keep putting meaning where the author didn't intend to put it. you have the makings of a fine literary critic. look out Paglia, hey look sharp there Harold Bloom. just read with a sense of purpose and the meaning will take care of itself. i think old Nabokov had it right: pay close attention to the details, and you'll be allright.

Not only pay close attention to the details, but read it twice.

Says Nabokov : You cannot read a book, only reread it !

Complete works of Shakespeare is a bit of a cheat!

I think taking along Proust and Thomas Mann NOT translated and a few other works in foreign languages you can manage but probably aren't fluent in would be the best idea, given the circumstances. Then assuming that you're not going to be shipwrecked alone, be sure that everyone has a different set of books!

why is it a cheat? My Norton edition is one book.

31...I concur completely, bridgitshearth! And don't you let that nasty tomcat try and convince you otherwise. I recommend you sic your cats, Puck & Mercutio on tomcat - may they rip his cheating list to shreds. My cat pees on your list, tomcat. Your list isn't even worthy to wipe my (yeah, I'm going to get crass and say it! even though lots of lovely ladies who certainly deserve better are present) crevasse with!

Btw, with no further adieu, let's welcome world traveler, bridgitshearth to the salon! I've read your "about me" and I believe the salon can indeed help you deal significantly with your denial.

You are an ignoramus, sir, a neophyte, a troglodyte, a platypus, a fool and a kidney bean. I spit on your ancestors, fart on all your works and days, and piss on your pillow.

Pah! Tolkien indeed.

I chew up your list. I spit it into martini shaker. I add lots of Popov vodka. I hock loogies into martini shaker. I shake martini shaker up. I pour into martini glass. Your Vodka Murrtini is served. I knock you over head with Norton Shakespeare. I pour Vodka Murrtini in your mouth. I make you drink. Yum. Care for an olive you brutish brit, you expat twit, you, you hoity-toity naysayer of holy Tolkien lit!

Seems like a good time to note that a review of the Silmarilion (sp?) has displaced Tomcat Murr from the Hot Reviews box.

P.S. The only people food my cat has ever shown much interest in: olives! And the interest is intense.

Where can You find the Hot Reviews box ?

On the "home" page on the right side. You must have the Hot Reviews box checked on your "Customize this page" form. You can find that on the home page at the top left by the mini version of your profile in the shaded box.

36...well said, slick! And who wrote The Silmarillion you may ask? That's right all you, cat lovers! - J.R.R. Tolkien!

Hey, Mac, when your review was posted, only 198 people owned the book, now, after your review, at last check, less than a week later, 202 people now own it. You've increased ownership of Tomcat Murr by just over 2%. Good work! I predict over 300 people will either own it or have wishlisted it by the time the salon's relay team of reviewers has crossed the finish line.

something BIG is happening here....: )

oh that is exciting news!!!!!
Well done MAc!!!!!!

*pointedly ignoring that streptococi Enrique and his childish and vulgar remarks about Tolkein. Pshaw!*

Holy Bible (The Hebrew part O.T. translated; I owuld want the N.T. in the original Greek)

Holy Koran (translated)

Lotus Sutra (would have to be a reliable translation; I donʻt know any Asian languages, past or present)

On the Marble Cliffs (Juenger)

Shakespeareʻs Othello; King Lear; Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night. "(Compl. Works" might be cheating , as suggested above; 4 would make an ordinary sized volume)

Tao te Ching (see Lotus Sutra, above, for trans.)

Finnegans Wake (Joyce)

Complete Poems of S. T. Coleridge

Compl. Poems and Letters of John Keats

Aeneid of Vergil

(All this really does is make you start forming sentences that begin "How could I have possibly left.........out?"

Tooo much religion in that list, Mr Perkins, for my taste, but I'm glad to see another admirer of the immortal Keats.

you included Othello but no Macbeth? And the Aeneid? The Odyssey is so much better! Your list saddens me.

At least #42 will have a lot to think about!

43...what do you mean too much religion, tomkitten?! owwww, you know that hurt.

I spit in the vodka of your irreligiostiy!

and I defecate on your idols, sir, you melisma, you spatula.

Lets not waste the precious bodily fluids. Close our eyes and listen to the cats as they scamper and scatter across the almost too-hot-to touch rooftops of summer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb_jQBgzU-I&feature=related

That was lovely!

Don't mention it Reg, tho I'm not all the kings horses, or all the kings men, I can patch a little crack now and again. Tho I think Tomcat & Enrique were just havin a leetle scratch, no more, I really wanted to send along that little bit of night musick of Mozart. Isn't there just a little smidge of irony in your comments? You have to break Weggs to shake wombats, what do I know?

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
3. Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
4. The City and the Stars by AC Clarke
5. Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury
6. the most recent edition of The World Almanac
7. Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson
8. LotR (in one volume, obviously) by JRR Tolkien
9&10. the "transistorized" version of the Oxford English Dictionary

#6 & #s 9/10 are there for just wandering through.
The rest are books I re-read on a regular basis.

Nice variety of material. Don't forget that magnifying glass!