HOW TO GET OFF A DESERT ISLAND: The Rat is revisiting an old question of ours–which ten books you’d take to a desert island–and asked me if I had any thoughts on my own list. Here’s my gut reaction. (We’d already set the rules of the game such that they allowed the Riverside Shakespeare and any translation of the Bible to count as one book each.) I’m only allowing myself to list books I’ve actually read, thus no listing Flannery O’Connor because on a desert island I’d finally get a chance to read her.

1) New Revised Standard Version Catholic Bible. Uh, feel free to yell at me about the NRSV, but it’s what I’ve got.

2) The Riverside Shakespeare. (If I had to pick three plays: Hamlet, Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost.)

3) The Brothers Karamazov.

4) Emily Dickinson’s complete poems.

5) Paradise Lost.

6) Any edition of Plato that included The Symposium and Parmenides.

7) You know, it’s been forever since I read it, but I’m tempted to list Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand here. I need to reread that.

8) Ulysses. Or Thus Spake Zarathustra–they’re kind of about the same things, what does it mean to say “Yes” to life, is the love or the beloved more important to the lover, that sort of thing. Right now I lean toward TSZ over Ulysses, but that tends to change more or less at random.

9) Any edition of Eliot that had the standard poems plus “Sweeney Agonistes.” Or maybe The Liar, because even on a desert island you’ve gotta laugh at something.

10) Philip Larkin, Collected Poems. To teach me how to write.

I wouldn’t take The Last Unicorn because I practically have it memorized.