One and Two For the definitive kings of aesthetics and thought, The Basics Works of Aristotle and The Norton Shakespeare. A very conservative choice, but I will engage in fisticuffs (albeit verbal, since the internet is rather metaphysical) with anyone who will deny that these two alone constitute an education. But don't take it from me...

Dante on Aristotle: "The master of those who know."

Robert Graves on Shakespeare: "The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good."

Three Wallace Stevens is my favorite writer, and The Palm at the End of the Mind is the definitive collection of his poetry. My words seem feeble in contrast with his, so I leave only the great and strange "Of Mere Being" (from which this collection gets its name:


The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Four Milton is my second favorite, but he is difficult. Not just as a writer, but very much as a person (his wife ran away from him). Some of his work can be an exemplary in Puritanical tedium, but few could argue with Paradise Lost. Shakespeare may have shaped the very language itself, but his words seem to inhabit a heavenly sphere of which we may dream but never live. Milton, in spite of his divine subjects, is far earthier. He strips his words of poetic rubrics, relying instead on the sly interactions between text and reader, and before we know it, we have become complicit in the fall itself. It is an undeniable masterpiece of rhetoric.

Five and Six For a break from all that high-brow, two very good stories that read themselves, and far be it for me to deny that entertainment, in literature, is less important than word games and philosophy. Neil Gaiman's American Gods is the kind of book that everyone loves. All my friends borrow it, lend it to their friends, sometimes I go a year without seeing it. Currently, my copy is in Venezuela (!). For more levity, I think the comic thunder of John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces will just hit the spot, or leave you paralyzed with stitches.

Seven Only one American fashion magazine is truly good, from an art perspective, and that is W.

Eight Now, something that I have not read and will keep me endlessly busy, simply because of its presence and length. As a cultural phenomenon, Proust annoys me, like a French James Joyce. I know one person who has read the whole of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu with the "seriousness it deserves", but even professors of French literature will admit that they have only skimmed it. Plus, "Proustian" is such an obnoxious, pompous word. For more on this subject, consider Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

Still, on a desert island, one likely has time to kill if starvation does not dominate the horizon of concerns, so... why not? I'd prefer to make the attempt in French, but I'm not entirely certain my linguistic skills are quite that limber. It sounds like the experience of a lifetime, at any rate.

Nine I considered adding a non-fiction book, but is there really one comprehensive enough for a desert island? And then: brainwave. Long before science, there was myth. And long before I had pretensions towards Proust, I devoured Greek myths. I am not familiar with this particular anthology The Complete World of Greek Mythology, as I picked up most of my knowledge here and there from Latin and Greek class, but it looks promising (and illustrated), especially since it seems the author did not edit out the saltier bits. It always rather pisses me off whenever I see the bowdlerized version of the birth of Venus, for example. They're not children's stories, they're the product of a highly sophisticated culture's attempt to explain the world.

Ten And finally, I must include one children's story and one about the love of books, and what better than Roald Dahl's Matilda?

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