Friday, April 08, 2005

The dreaded book meme – Part 5

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

First off, I would have to haveThe Junior Woodchuck Manual. I don't care if it's a fictional creation of Carl Barks, it's the world's greatest survival manual. It gives you careful, step-by-step directions on how to do anything, including speak to space aliens. Once my survival has been assured, I can worry about pleasure reading and improving my mind. As unoriginal as it sounds, I'd take a Bible. It's long, it has lots of stories, it's strewn throughout Western Literature, and it never hurts to study it for later arguments. As long as I'm away from city light for a while, I'd take a good star chart and study the sky. For the other two, I need big dense books, one fiction and one non-fiction, that I would never get around to at home. The non-fiction one would be Noel Mostert's 1300 page Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. South African colonial history was my secondary area of specialization in grad school. For the fiction I'll take a multivolume science fiction or fantasy series to be named at a later date.

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