For whatever reason, you must reduce the total numbers of books you own to twelve. If you own Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King in separate volumes, then keeping them leaves only nine open spots, even though they’re really just one book. Contrariwise, if you have all the Sherlock Holmes novels & stories in a single codex, you still have 11 spots left after choosing that one. Also, you may not run out & buy a Kindle & download tons of books that way, nor may you buy a single-volume copy of LOTR+Hobbit+Silmarillion if you don’t already have it.
I’ll start:
[ol]
[li]Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings[/li][li]Tolkien’s The Silmarillion[/li][li]Lewis’s Till We Have Faces[/li][li]Valerie Martin’s A Recent Martyr[/li][li]Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To[/li][li]Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying[/li][li]Pat Conroy’s Beach Music[/li][li]The aforementioned compleat Sherlock Holmes[/li][li]Adams’ first four Hitchhiker’s novels (sadly I do not own the five-volume version)[/li][li]Heinlein’s Expanded Universe[/li][li]The Concise Oxford Dictionary[/li][li]Bulfinch’s Mythology[/li][/ol]
I hesitated about the last. I like Hamilton’s Mythology better for the writing, but Bulfinch gives us more stories.
Whoa, I’m going to wait until this evening to answer this one, to give me time to think! I do know that To Kill a Mockingbird and The Oxford Study Edition of The Bible(NSRV, with Apocrypha) will be included.
Le Ministre de l’au-delà:(Strapped to the table saw, the whirring blade rapidly approaching his testicles) Take my life, you heartless bastard - I’m saving my books for my old age!
I didn’t say the other books were going to be destroyed. Feel free to assume they’re going into storage for, oh, a year.
ETA: Besides, even when I was doing the Evil Overlord bit, I’d never have done the “your books or your life” thing. I’d have sent the flying monkeys to steal the books, confiscate the ones I liked, and force you to watch while the flung poo on the rest. But you’ve have gotten them back later.
I’m thinking of any books I’ve always enjoyed re-reading. I would definitly have to have the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plus Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander Series, and Marion Zimmer Bradford’s Mists of Avalon. (I can watch Harry Potter as movies still, right?)
You might not be aware, because I try to keep my grousing about it down to every third post, but as of mid-October of last year, my bloody collection IS in storage, along with my scores, CDs, Vinyl recordings, backup copies of purchased software… I started packing up with the stuff I didn’t think I’d need right away in June of 2008.
I’ve lost track of the number of things that I’ve bought a second copy of because I couldn’t find the box with the one I already own in it, but the list starts with The Magic Flute, which I bought for a production I did in Hamilton in October, packed sometime just before we moved out of the old house, and needed for another production in London, ON in late May. Couldn’t find it… I now have two copies of La Traviata, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the Grade 9 RCM piano repertoire book, Langenscheidt’s English-German dictionary, the list goes on. [hijack] If one more person tells me that ‘If you’ve done without it for a year, you don’t really need it’, I will ensure that person is done without for a year… [/hijack]
Anyway, enough rant, here I go in the spirit of the OP -
Herodotus - The Histories
J. M. Roberts - The Penquin History of the World
The Mahabharata - mine’s in three volumes. trans. B. van Buitenen
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
e e cummings - Collected Poems
Michael Ondaatje - In the Skin of a Lion
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Tolstoy - War and Peace - mine’s in two volumes, so that’s me out.
The Bible The Early Upanishads - Patric Olivelle’s ed. + transl. The Rg Veda - McDonnell’s ed. (it’s the one I have) The Mahābhārata - Van Buitenen’s ed. + transl. (3 volumes and incomplete - but I love 'em) The Illiad The Odyssey The Histories - Herodotus The Collected Works of William Shakespeare Critique of Pure Reason - Kant Walden - Thoreau
On preview: Nice list, Ministre - half of it anyway
twitch This is like asking a parent which one of their children they would put in storage for a year. But, kinda sorta in order:
Complete works of Shakespeare.
Complete works of Plato.
Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe.
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Bible (KJV)
The Complete Stories - Franz Kafka
Basic Writings of Nietzsche
The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (has all the books in it)
London: The Biography - Peter Ackroyd
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Bradbury Stories: 100 of his most celebrated tales
(I was going to put Herodotus, but then I realized I really wouldn’t feel right having Herodotus and not Thucydides, and since I don’t personally own either of the absolutely fantastic Landmark Thucydides or Landmark Herodotus, I’d rather have my Homer [Lattimore]).
Please don’t slap my (apparently) long lost twin. No socks here, though admittedly a bit of trolling goes with my username. (I didn’t include Gargantua & Pantagruel as my copy is in 6 volumes - rather a waste of precious space).
[ol]
[li]Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway[/li][li]The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway[/li][li]Lord of the Rings - Tolkein[/li][li]The Hobbit - Tolkien[/li][li]Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass - Carroll[/li][li]Hamlet - Shakespeare[/li][li]Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut[/li][/ol]
At this point I’d go out and buy a few books. I do own over 12 books but I wouldn’t want to waste the rest of the spots on those particular books.
I own something like 3000+ books. You want me to cut it down to TWELVE?
IMPOSSIBLE!
Though definitely on my list would be the family heirloom copy of The Builders, 1856 edition. Not a long read, but absolutely lush printing. My only regret is that my mother had to die before it passed into my possession (and NO! I had nothing to do with her passing! Would still much rather have mom, since she let me look at it whenever I wanted anyway)
I actually AM trying to whittle down my collection, but I’m only planning to pare it down by half. At which point I’ll probably start collecting more books again.
