'The Ones I Never Had the Time to Read'

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 and thought. Something built to last on those long, lonely nights on the island.