What books would you take with you?
 

You are going to a deserted island for year and you can only take five books with you.

What are they?

One would be "How to survive on a deserted island",
Volumes 1 2 3 4

So what is the fifth book?

Everyone needs a nice coffee table book.

I would have to think about this for a while. The only thing that came to mind immediately was a two-volume set I used to have, “The Complete Works of Mark Twain.”. .or was it the “Collected Works”? Anyway, that guy sure had a handle on human nature.

The second thing I thought of when I read that question was an episode of “The Twilight Zone” when a man who loved to read was in the bank’s vault (I think it was) and when he came out, he was the only person left anywhere. He found the library but then broke his very thick glasses. It was awful. (I was a glasses-wearing little girl when I saw that episode, but I still remember it.)

Boomer

I remember it well. One of the first episodes of the first season as I recall.

Not precisely on topic, but...there is a YouTube series called "Twilight Tober Zone" that plays selected old episodes of the series. Good stuff.

As far as the books I'd take...Bible, Koran, The Book of Mormon, and the Hindu Itihasa and Vedas. Lots of time to compare and contrast, assuming I wasn't spending 18 hours a day just struggling to survive.

Not the Pentateuch.

Cook books for the area's flora and fauna, large books for kindling and books of matches.

burgess meredith of rocky fame

Gilligan where art thou
 

biographies of
albert einstein
marco polo
kublai khan
george washington
&
the bible

Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
On The Road - Kerouac
To Kill a Mocking Bird - Lee
Empire Falls - Russo
Any one of Tom Perrotta's Books

Outlander Series. Five of them because they are all over 1000 pages each.

Books
 

the collected stories of Agatha Christie, and all-in-one encyclopedia, had a survive in desert island, how to talk to yourself for one year straight and get a response,the Old Testament cuz I'd finally get to read it, and one good joke book

Wilderness Medical Society Practice Guidelines for Wilderness Emergency Care. (I have enough of a medical background to understand it and do a lot of it if necessary.)

SAS Survival Handbook, Third Edition: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere.

Complete Works of Shakespeare. (I was a college English professor.)

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1. (A lot of my favorite poems.)

How to Eat in the Woods: A Complete Guide to Foraging, Trapping, Fishing, and Finding Sustenance in the Wild.

Double ditto along with “How to build a boat out of next to nothing”

Janes Guide to Ship Building

Yes to Outlander, and I could read them over and over.

"Saltwater Fishing", "Trapping Sea Birds", "Cooking by Campfire", "Recipes for Seaweed" "How to Smoke SeaWEED", and "Removing Salt from Seawater". That's 6.

Tender is the Night
Grapes of Wrath
Rabbit, Run
The Big Sleep
Prince of Tides

I just checked the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. It was limited to 400 novels published by Random House.

The top five are

1. Ulysses
2. The Great Gatsby
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. Lolita
5. Brave New World

They seem to love Joyce as they also have Finnegans Wake as #77!

Modern Library Top 100 - Penguin Random House

We read Brave New World in College a long, long, time ago in a place far, far away. I used to think that I was a Beta, but maybe I really am just a gamma ?
.........I saw the Lolita movie - it was good FOR ITS TIME, but nothing compared to today's Cinementology.
.........Maybe new versions of these 2 movies would be interesting?

I found Ulysses to be almost impossible to read. Sentences that go on for pages.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (I had a really old hard-cover edition of this from the late 1800s but it got ruined in a hurricane)
An Anthology of Banned Books (by various authors) - 8,578 pages, in a digital file, which I'd use on my solar-powered e-reader
Whatever other 3 books contain the most pages, in paper. I'd read them and use the pages to help light fires so I could cook my fish on my deserted island. Hopefully I'd be rescued before I finished them all.

WILSON!!!!!

Could we switch the book to another venue? I'd rather have access to TOTV'S. It's a mystery, it's also always a work in progress. I would love to have a Political Section in my Island Version of TOTV'S. I would have to moderate myself. I've been behaving for so long I think it's time to mix things up a little bit before I go for my three-hour trip on The Minnow!

I have been enjoying Tom Hanks movies for decades. Especially since his acting in Sully.

It wouldn't make much difference which books I brought along. Within thirty minutes of arrival I would be saying, "Where in h*** are my reading glasses?".