In the right company it might spark an amusing diversion over dinner: what thirteen books would you take with you if marooned on a desert island? It’s a harmless parlor game reminiscent of adolescent boys arguing over who among them could withstand torture without betraying secrets. The risk, of course, is people showing off by naming volumes they think will make them sound “intellectual.” You know, like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – books they brandish for purposes of self-inflation with no intention of actually reading them. The same thing happens when politicians are asked what books they’ve been reading: “Oh, just À la recherche du temps perdu. In French.”
In the September 1982
issue of The English Journal, the editors asked twenty-seven high school
and college instructors that question. The feature is titled “Our Readers Write” and subtitled “A Baker’s Dozen Books I Would Take with Me If I Were Banished to a Desert
Island.” The respondents are not celebrity faculty members, prominent writers
or critics. I don’t recognize a single name on the list, and that’s a good
thing. Why not just ask working stiffs in the classroom, people who actually
teach children?
You can tell the question
was asked more than forty years ago. Respondents name some of Literature’s
Greatest Hits, and those names appear on multiple lists -- Shakespeare, Moby-Dick,
Montaigne, Dickens, Tolstoy. More teachers than I would have expected name Maugham. Many
list then-current or recent writers – John McPhee, Marilyn Hong Kingston and Eliot
Wigginton for his I Wish I Could Buy My Son a Wild Raccoon (1976). Wigginton
was founder of the Foxfire Project. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to child
molestation.
Alleen Nilsen of Arizona
State University names, along with Shakespeare and Boswell, Erica Jong’s Fear
of Flying and Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (and Human Male), along with
“my grandparents’ journals (mimeographed by the family), [and] a recent year’s
bound volume of the National Enquirer.” She adds: “These are not necessarily
the books I know and love. They’re the ones I never had the time to read.” One
inspired teacher names the Rev. Francis Kilvert’s Diary. Another, Henry
Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, along with Walt Kelly’s Ten
Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo and one of my favorite novels, Bernard
Malamud’s The Assistant. Some masochist names John Barth’s Giles
Goat-Boy. And Jane Christensen of the National Council of Teachers of
English selects Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Oddly, no one mentions Dante's Commedia.
For my list, I would suggest
a book I’m now rereading – Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers -- and
another American autobiography that was hurt into existence by communism, Nabokov’s
Speak, Memory. Then the Unamuno title mentioned above. Shakespeare, Montaigne
and Boswell, of course. The King James Bible and Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the
Poets. I don’t think I would include much fiction. Perhaps Tristram
Shandy and something by Conrad or George Eliot. Something familiar but
dense, thick with life. Something built to last on those long, lonely nights on
the island.
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