Nice try there, but I’m saving a copy of The Everlasting Man, Chesterton’s rebuttal to The Outline of History.
The Bible.
Ok, I kid, I kid.
The Odyssey or the Iliad.
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
The Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, sillies.
Since Catch-22 is gone, the Norton Anthology of Poetry it is!
If I’m feeling benevolent… Gray’s Anatomy.
If not… the one with the nuclear launch codes.
T*he God of Small Things *by Arundhati Roy
The most beautifully-written book I’ve read; one of only two times where I immediately re-read a novel upon finishing it. I don’t know how popular it is in Doperdom, either, so I gotta use my pick on it.
A Treasury of Short Stories, but I don’t know which volume…
Or maybe The Complete Kafka.
Hmmm… if I just wanted to preserve thoughts, I’d get a copy of Walden with “Civil Disobedience” included (assuming that counts as one volume).
If I was just thinking about staying out of the God Emperor’s gula- I mean, well-deserved rehabilitation retreats of joy, then I’d of course jump on the chance to be the first to choose one of the collections of the Perfect Master (whose knowledge prefigures and illuminates our loving and benevolent God-Emperor).
I never heard of it. What is it rebutting? Was it playing up religion over history? The only thing I really know about Chesterton is that he was a Christian apologist that inspired Lewis.
Which is at your public library because…?
Sometimes I both love and hate this board. What’s wrong with the Bible? It needs to be preserved no less than the Iliad & Odyssey.
Of course, if Fabulous Creature has conquered the Earth, you’ll be LIVING the latter in, like, a week.
I’d grab War & Peace just to be a dick.
Do you know how many times I’ve tried to read that book? I think it’s slightly fewer than the number of tries I wasted on Vanity Fair, but it’s a close second.
I finally ended up throwing Vanity Fair across the room and vowed I’d never pick it up again. (And I’m an English major. Thank heavens I never got assigned that piece of dreck!)
I was going to say War and Peace, under the hope that if it really was the only book I had access to I might finally get around to reading it, but since Madd Maxx already took that I’ll go for Zola’s Germinal, translated into English. Not quite as useful in the region of anarchy or monkey clobbering, but I’ve never been quite so stirred up against a regime as I was after reading that book; might assist us in agitating the masses against our literarily prohibitive overlord.
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Nothing wrong with it, but if I want to read it, its at Baker’s.
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Where I grew up, “the Bible” would be the only acceptable answer to this, or most other, book related questions.
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I remember enough of the parts I want to remember, (Ecclesiastes) and I can’t forget the parts I’d like to forget (Rock badger and ostrich - they seem like such odd foods to ban, and then to leave locusts on the menu; and don’t forget Genesis 34:24-29)
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I feel like reading the Iliad or the Odyssey.
Moby Dick would be a good choice, I haven’t read it in ages. Anna Karenina I don’t know if I’ll be able to read it again for years. My fabulous 1940’s copy of War and Peace was ruined - It had maps of Napoleon’s attack and retreat as the front flyleaf, and Hitler’s attack as the back flyleaf. He hadn’t yet retreated - they published that edition of War and Peace to buck up the brits about his inevitable doom. If I could find that again, I might preserve it.
Personally I might pick The Neverending Story or The Man Who Folded Himself, but to benefit mankind I think I’ll keep Godel Escher Bach an Eternal Golden Braid, or, you know, the print version of wikipedia 
Moby Dick
I will take A Tale of Two Cities.