G.K. Chesterton was once asked what he would most like to have with him if he found himself marooned on a desert island. He replied, somewhat whimsically, that he’d like to have a book on practical shipbuilding. In this, if not in too much else, I’d like to beg to differ with the great man. If I find myself marooned on a desert island, and leaving aside for the sake of the fantasy my anxiety at being separated from my wife and children, I’d like to surround myself with my favourite things and indulge myself in their enjoyment until a ship came (not too soon, I hope) to rescue me.Losing myself in the fantasy, I set about thinking what I would take with me, making a list of my ten favourite works in various categories. I would take ten Great Books, ten poems, ten novels, ten plays, and ten works of non-fiction.
I began, appropriately enough, with the Great Books, those canonical tomes without which our civilization would be significantly impoverished. I would take the Iliad and the Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and last but obviously not least the Holy Bible.
Moving on to the ten poems, I would take Beowulf in Tolkien’s translation, “Decease Release” by St. Robert Southwell, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” by Shakespeare, Coleridge’s “Hymn Before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni,” “The Wreck of The Deutschland” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (an appropriate theme for one marooned on a desert island!), “Twelfth Night,” “Tarantella,” and “The End of the Road,” all by the indomitable and inimitable Hilaire Belloc, and “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets” by the less indomitable but equally inimitable T.S. Eliot.
Next are the novels. I could not contemplate being without Jane Austen, and would take Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility with me. A life without Dickens would be equally unthinkable, though I would restrict myself, under great self-restraint, to A Christmas Carol, my indubitable favourite. I would have to take Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and would accompany it with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by that other great Russian, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I could not contemplate being without at least one of Chesterton’s novels and, forced to choose, would select The Man Who was Thursday, though I would be sorely tempted to smuggle The Ball and the Cross as an illicit addition to the library, if I thought I could get away with it. I would also take one of the novels by Chesterton’s great friend, Maurice Baring, probably C, though other worthy titles from his scandalously neglected pen would serve equally well. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh could not possibly be left behind, nor could either The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion, even though neither of these prose epics by Tolkien could strictly be considered novels. Some rules are clearly meant to be bent, if not broken, and the thought of excluding classic trans-genre titles, such as Tolkien’s, simply because they cannot be neatly pigeonholed, would be patently absurd.
And so to the ten plays. I would take the Three Theban plays by Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus, the only works of drama in the entire canon that come close to the genius of Shakespeare, me judice. And as for Shakespeare himself, one hardly knows where to start, or finish, in selecting which of his plays should accompany me to the desert island. Since I can never make up my mind whether my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays is Hamlet or King Lear, oscillating between one and the other, depending on the day of the week, or the direction the wind is blowing, or the phases of the moon, I would clearly need to bring both with me. I would take two comedies, The Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor, one dark and problematic, the other light and rambunctious, and would complete my handful of the Bard’s plays with The Tempest, a singularly appropriate choice for a shipwrecked man. This leaves me two other selections, both of which would be plucked from the twentieth century: Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot and A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt.
My final selection of books in this desert island desiderata are the works of non-fiction. This selection would be dominated by that most marvelous of monsters, the Chesterbelloc, without whom I would not have reached the state of mind in which all the other works on this list became accessible or desirable. Without Chesterton and Belloc, I might not be a Christian today and would in consequence be wasting my time and life on the trivia and trash that the Zeitgeist dishes out to it subjects. The Great Books would be unknown to me and I would be wallowing in the shallows of fashion and its twilit shadows. Today, I see by the light of Christ (thanks be to God!) but my eyes were opened to such light, under grace, by Chesterton and Belloc. I would, therefore, be both foolish and ungrateful – and lonely! – were I not to want them with me on my desert island.
I would take two books by Belloc, The Path to Rome and The Four Men, both of which are elegiac in character, waxing with whimsy and waning into wistfulness, and are therefore so poetic in quality that they cannot be considered strictly non-fiction. Since, however, they are not strictly poetry, and are plainly not works of fiction, they will have to be squeezed into the non-fiction section of my desert island library, in much the same way as the works of Tolkien had been squeezed into the fiction section. Perhaps there is a need for a separate trans-genre section to the library but I will stay clear, at this time, of such a controversial suggestion!
I would select six books by Chesterton, none of which I could imagine being without. These are Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, his Autobiography and In Defense of Sanity, the last of which is a recently published selection of the best of Chesterton’s essays. I would also bring with me to my island a copy of Have You Anything to Declare?, a rarely read gem by Maurice Baring. The concept of this book is not unlike the idea for this article, being a selection of what Baring calls the “literary baggage” he had travelled with during his life and which he would declare as luggage he would like to take with him after death. Since Baring is much better read than I, and since he was a polyglot, conversant in several languages and cognizant of many others, ancient and modern, I feel in his presence what Chesterton felt in the presence of the Dominican, Father Vincent McNabb, that he walks on a crystal floor above my head. This being so, why would I not want such a mentor on my island with me, guiding me through his own literary luggage so that I could benefit from a man so much better dressed in terms of culture than I could ever hope to be?
My final selection would be Blessed John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, a book which impacted me greatly when I first read it, oh so many years ago.
Assembling such a gathering of books around me, marooned in blessed solitude, I’m not sure that I would be in any hurry to be rescued. In fact, were a ship to arrive before I’d had time to read all of these volumes multiple times, I think I’d ask the captain to come back later, in a year or two, bringing with him all those books I’d left behind, which were now weighing on my conscience as sins of omission. How could I have left C.S. Lewis behind? What on earth was I thinking? Or Boethius? Or Bede? Or Chaucer? And what of the many works of Dickens?
As I watched the ship sail off into the sunset, leaving me behind, I’d spend a moment or two wondering how things were in the world of wasted time, the world where needlessly created wants whirl around like a dust storm in a desert. Leaving such idle thoughts behind I’d return to my own little world in which time is well spent and not wasted, a world where time is made for the permanent things and the important things. I would take up the volume I’d been reading when I’d been rudely interrupted and would find myself once again in the presence of giants who had become my friends.
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All great choices, but for me, I would leave out Brideshead Revisited, and go with The Possessed another Doestoevsky great.
Profound information on building a library with depth.
This is a fine list. As a person who has spend many years in an academic imprisonment (bureaucracy), Newman’s _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ has been one of my few sources of solace.
I have the first (book) edition by Longman, Green (1864). It was originally published in pamphlet form (8 parts) and how erudite people back then must have looked forward to purchasing the instalments, much like less erudite people nowadays revel in the next episode of the Game of Thrones! A physically beautiful book it is, with a fine custom binding. “Newman” is my confirmation name.
I love book lists, and will try to further educated myself with this one.
“…and last but obviously not least the Holy Bible.”
To be sure, but Mr Pearce: what we really wish to know is which translation into English is it that you hope to find on the beach next to the Captain’s cell phone? Both waterproofed of course.
I’m with GKC on this. Even if I fully intended to enjoy an extended stay on that deserted island, I’d not only include a book on boat building, I’d begin working on that boat soon after I arrived. With that boat, I’d have options. Without it, I’d be in deep trouble if, for instance, I became seriously sick. As the Boy Scouts say, “Be Prepared.” Having choices doesn’t mean you have to make them.
Charming piece–and I’m pretty sure “The Man Who Was Thursday” could help me live through any experience, any at all.
Of course today the “Greats” lists would be dominated by 2nd rate adventure novels and the memoirs of movie stars and whatever else could be squeezed into the trash bucket of contemporary semi-literacy.
Belloc and Chesterton for certain, Virgil and of course poetry,
This is a great list. I’m surprised, based on Mr. Pearce’s book “Race with the Devil”, that he did not include the Chesterton book that had a major impact on his life: The Outline of Sanity”
It’s clear I am out of my league in this forum. I could sit and read the rest of my life and hardly make a dent in Mr Pearce’s library.
Great choices, but you’re cheating a bit. There’s a very clear description of ship building in The Odyssey. 🙂
Sounds great. 🙂 O, to be away from civilization, if just for a bit!
I would bring a math textbook and a biology textook, two subjects I really regret not learning.
Beyond that, I would bring Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, the Pali Canon, Ovid, and Inspirations and Ideals by Grenville Kleiser.
Emma is my favorite Austen book, long before the movie Clueless. The doings at the Box Hill picnic (terrible comments by Emma about two older single ladies just ekking out a living) affected me so much that I visited Box Hill when in England, as well as Jane’s home, her grave at the Cathedral and the long strand at Lyme Regis.
I thought the novel the French Lieutenant’s Woman has the same jolting come-uppance as Emma (although a different book than the one set at Lyme Regis). The upper class guy from London is intending to rescue the abandoned, ruined woman from a life of prostitution in London, but she’s been taken in by the Pre-Raphaelites and is doing very fine without his help. So I went to the Tate and saw some of these guys’ works and the red haired subjects. My favorite is the drowning Ophelia, a copy of which hangs in my living room. The original shows the botanically interesting details. Turns out the community didn’t just recruit the women as models; they taught them to paint.
So – From there I discovered Dante Rossetti’s sister, the poet who wrote what became the lyrics of one of my favorite Christmas songs, In the Cold, Cold Winter.
My point is – you get started with great material and get led to more and more great stuff.
I’m glad I found this site.