Books for My Desert Island

I'm sure just about everyone has a mental list of the books they'd take to a desert island.  (A friend told me the only title she would take is How to Get Off a Desert Island.)  This was a hard list for me to make, especially because my boat would have sunk under the weight of all my choices.  So, painful as it is, I'm limiting my booklist to just 12.  I'm excluding works by friends of mine; everything else is fair game.  (It's just a given that Shakespeare and the Bible will already be on board.)  In true Letterman style, I'm starting at the bottom with #12.

12.  The Confessions (Rousseau):  I'm not trying to sound erudite -- this book is awesome.  No one, not even the Kardashians, could write about their lives as frankly as Rousseau did.  I kept marveling over how a book centuries old -- what my sister would call something written "with feathers" -- could feel as modern as any current tell-all.

11.  Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Thomas Merton):  I can't leave without something by Merton, the American Trappist monk whose wry outlook and plain style made him so widely popular (for an American Trappist monk).  His spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, must be his most popular and enduring work, but I'm going with Conjectures, one of several journals he published about his life as a monk and a writer.  This particular journal is his most topical and serendipitous -- his mind bounces all over the place on topics relating to issues that concerned him beyond the monastery walls.  It's a good portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s.

10.  A Moveable Feast (Hemingway):  I'm not too particular when it comes to books about writers, just as long as they're expatriate American writers living in Paris during the 1920s.  Hemingway, who had moved there with his first wife Hadley and son "Bumby," hobnobbed with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and other luminaries of that period.  (Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris pays a comic but affectionate homage to this period and is justly one of his most popular and best-reviewed films.)  Hemingway doesn't always play nice -- you feel sorry for Scott after reading about a road trip the two friends took -- but when he reminisces about writing in sidewalk cafes with rain falling beyond the steamy windows, using all those perfect and inimitable declarative sentences -- all is forgiven.

9.  5001 Nights at the Movies (Pauline Kael):  Ordinarily reading about movies on a desert island would be torture for me, but with Kael it's more than just the movies:  it's her irresistible, freewheeling style that I can't live without.  You couldn't always tell where she was going with an idea or exactly when the review would end, but it was just so much darn fun going along for the ride. Maybe the most valuable lesson I learned about movies from her is that even a bad movie can have moments of brilliance worth stumbling upon, that a trashy movie can be more worthwhile than some bloated Oscar bait.  (I mean, who lately has rushed to their DVD shelf to watch Gandhi for the twelfth time?)  Of all her collections, I'd choose this one in a heartbeat because it's a massive compilation of bite-size reviews covering movies that go clear back to the beginning of talkies.  Her excitement over movies she loves is as thrilling as Roger Ebert's despair over those he hates (and Ebert's negative reviews are some of the funniest reviews I've ever read).  Finally, I suspect she was just a really nice woman, considering she actually wrote me a reply once, and on New Yorker stationery at that.

8.  Emma Who Saved My Life (Wilton Barnhardt):  Barnhardt's not a household name, and Emma isn't up there with Don Quixote and Ulysses, but it's without a doubt the one novel that makes me laugh out loud each time I read it.  It's about a young writer seeking fame and fortune in Greenwich Village during the 1970s (just like me, but I'm in no way biased).  Emma is the neurotic poet he befriends.  Desert islands are no laughing matter, which is why this will be required reading.

7.  Zen Flesh, Zen Bones -- A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings (compiled by Paul Reps):  Back in the 1970s (again), in the midst of my Eastern Religion phase, I discovered this little paperback and gave it a place of honor alongside Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki on my spiritual bookshelf.  The title says it all: these very brief stories (most less than a page long) teach some valuable lessons in Zen living and thinking, but in a simple, almost entertaining way.  I've since moved on from Watts and Suzuki to Merton and C.S. Lewis, but I've never abandoned my original copy of this one.

6.  Anna Karenina (Tolstoy):  Boy, this was tough -- it was either Anna or Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  Tess is the novel closest to my heart, the story that keeps me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end and whose heroine I have real affection for.  But Anna Karenina encompasses a whole world, and that would last me longer out in the middle of the ocean.  As a kid, I pictured the name "Tolstoy" as a massive, impenetrable block of granite.  But this book, which I prefer to War and Peace (mainly because I think one should at least finish a novel before assessing it), proved to be completely accessible and as absorbing as any fiction I'd ever read.  Before the first chapter is over, you'll know all about these characters and want to know more right now.  The only curious thing, and I wonder if Tolstoy realized this might happen, is that I relate to and care more about Dolly and Levin than I do Anna and Count Vronsky.  But that's nitpicking.  I wouldn't change a syllable.

Now we come to my five favorites, and I stop to mention this only because numbers 12 through 6 are ultimately negotiable, whereas these final five are the books I will never be without, island or otherwise.

5. Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry):  The only novel I've read three times, and it's big.  Robert Duvall, who portrayed Augustus McRae in the TV miniseries adaptation, said Gus was the best role he had ever played or ever would play.  He called the character Shakespearean, and I agree.  Gus and Woodrow Call, ex-Texas Rangers who embark on an ill-advised, epic cattle drive from Texas to Montana, are as vivid and memorable as anyone McMurtry -- or anyone else -- has ever created.  McMurtry has said he wrote the book as an antidote to our romanticized vision of the Old West.  He wanted to demythologize it, but instead gave us a whole new myth.  I don't know a friend who's read it who hasn't felt passionate about it (and in a good way), and most of these are people who don't like Westerns.  It's also the only book that ever made me cry.  When I got to the saddest of many sad parts while reading on a work break, I had to go outside and walk around the block so no one would see me.  OK, enough said.

4.  Franny and Zooey (Salinger):  You can have your Holden Caulfields -- I've had a crush on Franny Glass since I was a teenager.  "Franny" and "Zooey" were related stories printed in The New Yorker over time back in the early 1960s.  In "Franny," the shorter of the two stories, college student Franny and her beau Lane Coutell have an interesting discussion in a restaurant.  In "Zooey," Zooey, who is Franny's brother, and their mother have an interesting discussion in a bathroom while Franny lies on a sofa in the living room.  They're discussing Franny, who, at the end of "Franny," has suffered what appeared to be some sort of breakdown precipitated by a religious book she was reading.  Franny and Zooey is a small book that had a tremendous impact back then, especially on college campuses.  It's the book that dared me to write something anywhere near as good, which I've been failing at miserably ever since.

3.  The Habit of Being -- The Letters of Flannery O'Connor:  These letters should be as celebrated as the classic short stories.  O'Connor's intelligent, wry, and immensely likeable voice leaps from each page, and closing the book at the end is like saying goodbye to a new best friend.  People have tried to pigeonhole her as a "Catholic" or a "Southern Gothic" writer, but her works transcend all labels, and she has lots to say about this, too.  I taught a few of her stories to college freshman in some writing classes, and the students were actually, palpably livid when they got to the end of the title story in her collection A Good Man is Hard to Find.  How could an escaped convict slaughter an entire family and that be the end of it?  That never happened on The Cosby Show.  Never mind their reaction to "Good Country People," in which a Bible salesman steals a girl's wooden leg.  I mention these instances only because I'm sure they would have made O'Connor laugh and laugh, and then she would probably have said, "Good."

2.  The Stories of John Cheever:  I've heard that Alice Munro's stories are like novels in miniature, and that's the way Cheever's are, too.  His milieu is suburban New England and the Mid-Atlantic states during the seemingly benign postwar years of the 1940s and 1950s.  It's a world of tired businessmen and lonely housewives, resentful children and restless lovers, all of them coping with the emptiness of their sterile American lives.  What distinguishes these characters is that Cheever genuinely loves them, and so we do as well, or at least we certainly come to understand them.  If you want to start somewhere, read "The Swimmer," one of his most celebrated tales (adapted for the big screen in the 1960s).  It has a simple plot that is nevertheless unlike any other, and the conclusion is shattering.

1.  The Poems of W.B. Yeats:  I want his poems fed to me intravenously on my deathbed.  They're the only things that will keep me alive.