April 7, 2004

Desert Island Books

It's odd that I haven't got around to working on this page until now. Perhaps it's because I'd rather read books than write about them. Anyway, I thought that I'd kick off with a Desert Island Books list: ten books to accompany my ten records on my lonely island. Except that I'm going to list fifteen rather than ten - no need to perpetuate the David Letterman fallacy.

In the original Desert Island Discs show on BBC Radio, the guests were invited to choose one book "in addition to the Bible". Later on this was expanded to "the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare", and still later a dictionary was added to the "givens". I'll happily take the Shakespeare and the dictionary; I have no use for the Bible or any other work of mythology.  All of my choices have to pass the "read and re-read" test: I have read many wonderful books that I have no desire to read a second time.

In no particular priority, then:

  1. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
  2. The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History by Colin McEvedy
  3. Britain and the H Bomb by Lorna Arnold
  4. Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg
  5. I, Asimov by Isaac Asimov
  6. Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
  7. The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins
  8. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
  9. A Path from Rome by Anthony Kenny
  10. The Flight of Peter Fromm by Martin Gardner
  11. Sarum by Edward Rutherford
  12. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
  13. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
  14. HMS Ulysses by Alastair Maclean
  15. Secret Water by Arthur Ransome
The first nine are non-fiction, the last six are fiction.

April 7, 2004

Authors Whose Work I'd Buy Sight Unseen

While compiling the Desert Island Books list, I noticed that there were a number of authors for whom I seemed to have just about everything they'd published. That suggested a second list: Authors Whose Work I'd Buy Sight Unseen. Self-explanatory, I hope. It's interesting how many of them are science fiction writers: I don't think of myself as a science fiction addict. Whatever....

Alphabetically, then:
  1. Iain M. Banks
  2. Stephen Baxter
  3. Richard Dawkins
  4. Alain de Botton
  5. Daniel Dennett
  6. Stephen Fry
  7. Neil Gaiman
  8. David Lodge
  9. Philip Pullman
  10. J. K. Rowlings
  11. Neal Stephenson
  12. John Varley
  13. Connie Willis