05 October 2009

Monday of Great Books Week

A tweet from Grammar Girl led me to the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors Great Books Week blog tour.  I'm in!

Day 1, Monday
Seven books for a desert island: what I would need to get me by.
  1. The Bible.  Maybe Eugene Peterson's emminently readable The Message, or the New King James with an Orthodox commentary.
  2. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin.  Haunting images, industrial New York, fantasy and history, this book leaves me with a physical ache to wrap up in a rug and take a midnight sleigh ride through time across a frozen lake.
  3. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Alyosha!  I would happily while away the hours with you and your corrupted old father and your tortured brothers.
  4. Dracula, Bram Stoker.  I never tire of the old bat; the screenplay and production has played in my head a million times, each one a million times better than Coppola's.  Damn Keanu!
  5. The Lord of the Rings, Tolkein. Duh.
  6. The Golden Bough,  James Frazer.  Just because I have never found the time to read this definitive survey of folk culture and symbolism that has inspired everything from TS Eliot's The Wasteland to Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King.
  7. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut.  Lucky me! Lucky mud!  An appropriately absurdist apocalyptic love story.  Love it to pieces.