Day 1, Monday
Seven books for a desert island: what I would need to get me by.
- The Bible. Maybe Eugene Peterson's emminently readable The Message, or the New King James with an Orthodox commentary.
- 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.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Alyosha! I would happily while away the hours with you and your corrupted old father and your tortured brothers.
- 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!
- The Lord of the Rings, Tolkein. Duh.
- 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.
- Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut. Lucky me! Lucky mud! An appropriately absurdist apocalyptic love story. Love it to pieces.
