Seen all those Ideal Bookshelf and Desert Island Bookshelf lists floating about these days? Us, too. So we got to thinking, which must-have books would Breakwater authors most want to be stranded with?
Claire Wilkshire, author of the forthcoming debut novel, Maxine:
Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
T.S. Eliot Collected Poems 1909-1962
Leon Rooke Who Do You Love
John Metcalf Adult Entertainment
Richard Ford Independence Day
John Le Carré Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Terry Pratchett Reaper Man
+ A really good, fat dictionary like my Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary. I think it cost $15 at Coles: best bargain ever. I keep it by the bed so I can use it for the cryptic crosswords in the Globe.
…. (I can’t start putting Newfoundland novels on this list because I wouldn’t be able to stop.)
Joan Sullivan, author of In the Field:
I don’t have much of a library at home, as I tend to pass along books (I just don’t like “stuff”). But those I have include:
1. The Mandarins, by Simone de Beauvoir. What befalls a group of French intellectuals immediately following WWII. Characters based on de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus. It is political and sensual and dramatic. When I first read it, I was younger than the main character’s daughter. Every five years or so I re-read it, and now I am older than the main character.
2. A book of Shakespeare’s Tragedies that belonged to my grandmother, Rose Hoskins. She died when I was six months old.
3. All of Lisa Moore’s stories and novels. She is my friend and I love her writing.
4. Something new from the library. Might be the latest Rankin or a writer I’ve found like Ann Packer or Steve Yarbrough.
5. Jane Austen, no explanation needed.
6. A young adult book/autobiography called We Shook the Family Tree by Hildegarde Dolson, a book I read in Grade 6 or 7 and loved and never forgot. My daughter found it for me on Amazon. Speaking of young adult novels, my daughter has a flourishing library and I constantly borrow from it, The Perks of Being a Wildflower, Rob Lowe’s Stories I Only Tell My Friends (excellent read, by the way), The Book Thief …
Calvin Evans, author of Silk Sails: Women of Newfoundland and Their Ships and coming Spring 2013, Master Shipbuilders of Newfoundland and Labrador:
I guess my favorite books fall into two categories, as might be expected with my dual professions:, so here goes:
Simone Weil The Need for Roots
John R. W. Stott Basic Christianity
John Oman Grace and Personality
C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity
Oscar Williams, ed. Immortal Poems of the English Language
Alister McGrath Passion for Truth
**and**
D. W. Prowse History of Newfoundland
Dictionary of Newfoundland English
Gordon Handcock The Story of Trinity
Capt. Allan Villiers Men, Ships and the Sea
E. R. Seary Family Names of the Island of Newfoundland
William Christian and Sheila Grant The George Grant Reader
… and from Jennifer Morgan, artist, children’s author and illustrator of Almost Home: The Sinking of the SS Caribou:
Okay, I couldn’t resist this excuse to not work!
Oxford’s Dictionary of English
National Geographic World Atlas
The Bible
Shakespeare’s Collected Works
Harold Bloom’s The Invention of the Human
One empty book
Edible Plants for the region where I’m marooned
A book of matches
And…since I will not have any excuse not to read it:
James Joyce’s Ulysses
and (why not?) Homer’s Ulysses also.