I notice that today's "Writer's Block" thingy asks what five books one would bring along to a desert island. I'm going to use this question to distract me from the fact that the house smells like fucking cat spray, and the much more infuriating fact that the
reason it smells like cat spray is because the Demon
broke into the pony room (he has a knack for opening doors, EVEN WHEN THEY HAVE BEEN JAMMED SHUT WITH A STOOL) and sprayed, for no reason,
in spite of being neutered, on the
one pony card that my sister and I still have from when we were kids. (We had about a hundred different ones as kids. We managed to save only this one. THANK YOU, Demon, for proving once again the aptness of your epithet.)
Ahem. Anyway. Books.
I'm going to assume that my exile to this desert island is permanent, so that I'd better take along books I already know I like, and not books I've simply been meaning to read but might not want to spend the rest of my solitary life with. Realistically, I would want some bloody enormous books -- probably the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Complete Works of Melville, Hugo, Marquez... that sort of thing. And probably The Bible, since whether one believes a word of it or not, it certainly contains enough material to keep one occupied for several lifetimes.
But assuming I have to actually pick five individual works, and not collections of books or stories -- I'll take Moby Dick, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The Idiot, and Les Miserables. (Er. Except, again,
realistically, I'd probably replace the latter two with Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Amber, because I'm not actually sure how much I'd care about Dostoevsky's philosophizing, or the socio-political climate of post-revolution France, if I were stuck with them on an island. Whereas quests and heirs and ancient kingdoms will always have some sort of Jungian appeal.)
( ...God, what a smug little creep. )