Nine months of boredom with only ten books for company: your list, please.

Note: I’m a hospice worker/caregiver, which is, more than anything, an exercise in boredom control. Forgive me for the length, skip to the end for the tl;dr version.

Ok, [del]so you’re stranded on a desert island[/del]…naw, too clichéd. Lessee…

Ah. Here we go. Ok. Your Cessna has gone down in the Alaskan bush, early September, and you are the only survivor. Perhaps luckily, the plane crash-landed near a stream. Perhaps unluckily, the plane is now sitting under some dense treetop foliage, and the chances of the plane being spotted by rescuers is distressingly remote. Remembering the old “follow a stream to safety” adage you learned as a kid, you decide to hike out.

Now, you have on your person enough winter clothing that a hike in the woods isn’t a big deal. In the plane is a duffel bag with your serious cold-weather gear, as well as a rather complete survival kit shoehorned into a backpack. You take both, and begin your journey.

Dusk. You are cold, your feet in blisters. You begin to wonder when a good time to stop is. You need enough time to set up the small tent that is nestled in the survival kit and have a few crackers. While pondering this as you walk along the creekbank, you turn a tight bend in the stream and suddenly you come upon a cabin. You are ecstatic, and make a beeline for the front door.

When you approach the cabin, you notice moss and leaves on the deck in front of the door. Obviously, nobody lives here. Perhaps it’s a seasonal trapper’s cabin, perhaps it’s simply abandoned… either way, your hope of quick rescue is now shattered. However, your imminent problem - namely, shelter for the night - has been solved. Very good.

The cabin is small, perhaps 15 feet to a side. Inside is a small bed with a large stack of wool blankets balanced on top, a rusty oil-drum woodstove in the center of the room, and a counter nailed together from old planks running down one wall. Certainly seems cozy enough for the night. You tuck yourself under the blankets and quickly go to sleep.

During the night it begins to snow. You don’t know when it started, because when you wake up there is a thick blanket of the white stuff on the ground. Obviously, it had been snowing for quite some time, and heavily. Hmm… this will definitely slow down your travel. Better look for some snowshoes.

You begin to explore the cabin and the surrounding area. Since it was nearly dark when you arrived the previous night, you didn’t get a chance to look around. The first thing you notice as you walk around the back of the cabin is a huge rotting lean-to filled with cut firewood. You do a quick calculation and decide there must be at least ten cords of wood, ready for the stove. Next to the woodpile is a small cache built on stilts. Your curiosity piqued, you climb the ladder, open the door, and are greeted by an amazing sight: shelved and boxes of food, sundries, and other miscellaneous supplies. Easily enough to last a person through a winter. There’s cans of beef stew, Hormel chili, Spam, Campbell’s soup of all kinds… you see cans of fruit cocktail, oranges, peaches and pears. There are sealed bags of beans, rice, flour, cornmeal, sugar and coffee. In the corner is stacked tools: A couple of axes, some shovels, bow saws. Satisfied, you close the door and return the cabin.

The daylight coming through the windows allows you a much better look at the furnishings. Hanging on the wall above a shelf is 30.06, and on the shelf are several dozen boxes of cartridges. There is also a flare gun and a large canvas satchel of flares. Hanging next to the shelf are a pair of snowshoes, which you missed earlier in the morning. On the wall above the counter are several pots and pans. There is silverware and knives in a box, and a couple of plates and a coffee mug sitting on the counter. There are two oil lamps and a large bucket of kerosene under the counter, along with a couple boxes of wax-tipped matches. Continuing your search, you find a small steamer trunk under the counter. You pull it out, dust it off and open it. The first thing you see is a checkers board and a couple decks of playing cards. Moving those aside, you see a treasure trove: easily a year’s supply of Laphroaig and Marlboro Reds. There is also a dozen or so spiral college notebooks, and small box of fresh pencils… also two very useful books: the U.S Army’s FM 21-11 and FM 21-76, a first-aid manual and a survivial manual, respectively.

On the spot, you make a decision. Rather than risking life and limb trekking through the bush, you decide to hole up in the cabin over the winter, and try for civilization again after the snow melts in spring. It’s September, there is already snow on the ground, and you would be taking a big risk to continue on foot. The cabin offers everything you need to stay safe and warm: shelter, heat, food, protection.

While thinking about this, your eye strays toward a dark corner of the cabin near the head of the bed. Nestled in the corner is a shelf attached the cabin wall. You aren’t sure why you haven’t noticed it yet, so you go and investigate. On the shelf are ten books. To your immense surprise and delight, they happen to be the exact same ten books you would have chosen had you had to choose ten books to keep you company though the winter stuck in a 225 square foot room!

So.

What ten books would choose to keep you entertained through the winter? Keep in mind these ten books will have to keep you company for somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 months. 9 months with absolutely nothing else to do but read those ten books. No magazines, no newspapers, no electronic devices of any kind. You might play checkers against yourself or a game of solitaire, but these ten books are your main source of entertainment through a very long winter. Choose wisely…

I won’t leave you all hanging. My Choices, after much thought:

KJV Bible, spanish edition. I was raised Catholic, now am agnostic. I still feel there is a lot of wisdom in this book, even if I don’t take it literally.

New York Public Library Desk Reference, 3rd ed.. Since Wikipedia and Cracked.com aren’t available, this wonderful book is a awesome time-waster.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. Industrial-strength knowledge for serious nerds. I have a magnifying glass built into the Swiss Army knife in the survival bag.

Shibumi, spanish edition. Trevanian’s classic novel. I could read it once a month and not get tired of it.

Jurassic Park, spanish edition. This is one the first mainstream novels I ever read, and still love it. Big Mac and fries for the brain.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Need I say more?

The Count of Monte Cristo, spanish edition.. Simply a great novel.

The first Straight Dope book. Obviously.

Dos Mundos. An unparalleled introduction to spanish textbook.

HarperCollins Spanish Dictionary Plus Grammar, 2nd ed. This plus Dos Mundos, along with the spanish language novels, should help my atrocious spanish become merely mediocre.

I’m going to go with a general list in the interests of expediency:

a good general reference book
a thorough art history book
a book for learning another language
a math puzzle book
a thick book of very thin pages that I could sketch in with charcoal
a weighty book of poetry
hmm… 4 more books. Lord of the Rings, Shakespeare, a book to help me understand relativity, perhaps a book on learning chess.

Where do I sign up? 9 months with nothing to do but learn sounds great :smiley:

Why ten? Get a kindle with 3G (if you’re on an island). Right now I have 150 books on my kindle.

BTW, your choices strike me as… well… boring. There are a lot of reference books there. Will you really need them? Nine months isn’t all THAT long.

How about deep, lush novels that you can read over and over, like

All the King’s Men
Anna Karenina
Cloud Atlas
Pavilion of Women (Pearl Buck)
Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese)
The Sparrow & Children of God (Mary Doria Russell)
A Thread of Grace (Mary Doria Russell)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
East of Eden

Volume is probably my primary concern. I read “Game of Thrones” in 4 days.

Roald Amundsen’s book, The South Pole. it’s ginormous and I’ve been meaning to read it. Plus I might learn something useful and applicable to my situation.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, plus sequels Green Mars, Blue Mars. Very large, sprawling novels that can be re-read numerous times.

It’s hard to argue against the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. After you get done reading them through (including the boring and silly ones), memorizing monologues is a good way to waste time.

That’s five. I have to think harder about the rest.

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (my favorite novel, and it’s always a joy to reread)
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes (the history of the founding of Australia)
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman (the entire run of the comic)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote
A Contract with God by Will Eisner (one of the first graphic novels, and one of the best).

I’d want long ones. My best guess at what would keep me busy, and when I cite a “complete works” volume it’s because I know one exists…

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Richard Burton
Essays of Montaigne
Complete works of Shakespeare
Complete short stories of Ray Bradbury
Complete works of Jane Austen
Complete Sherlock Holmes
Complete Edgar Allen Poe
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
The Golden Bough by James Frazer (some concern that this one might not be entertaining)
The Merck Manual of Diagnosis & Treatment

If only “books” that came in multiple volumes were an option here, I’d replace The Golden Bough with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and A Pattern Language with A Dance To the Music Of Time by Anthony Powell.

-Brothers Karamazov (always wanted to read it, never bothered. This seems like the time)
-Complete works of Shakespeare
-some sort of long puzzle book. Crosswords, logic puzzles or trivia questions. Preferably all 3 in one huge volume
-an encyclopedia
-a comprehensive book of myths and legends
-Cloud Atlas
-The complete works of Jorge Luis Borges
-Art History, perhaps Jansens
-something just plain fun. The Harry Potter series, if that counts as 1 book.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales would be number one, it’s enormous and I can reread it over and over and still get something new out of the old, familiar stories.

Gone With the Wind (because I haven’t read it yet and I know it’s super-long) and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 3-in-1 anthology. It might be considered cheating because it’s technically three stories in one book, but it’s still just one book. Then the complete works of Poe, complete works of Shakespeare, and… I’ll think of more later. Maybe a few anthologies of Kurt Vonnegut short stories?

Clearly, at least one, and possibly several, of the books would be math textbooks, if the criterion is something that has the capacity to keep me busy for a long time. Even if I mastered the material contained in the book itself, it could serve as a basis for further investigations.

Perhaps one or two other big, thick, meaty textbooks or other educational, informative books I could really sink my teeth into and work my way through.

A big anthology of poetry would be good, since poetry generally benefits from being read slowly and carefully, and from re-reading, and I could pass the time memorizing my favorite poems/passages.

Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson might be a good choice—plenty of vicarious conversation if I can’t have the real thing.

The Bible. Yeah, I’ve already read it, but considering all the gazillions of words that have been written about the Bible, I’m thinking it’d give me plenty of food for thought, and I’m not likely to “use it up.”

The rest would be long, substantial novels or Collected Workses that I’ve haven’t yet read but am reasonably sure I’d want to.

Sorry. I can’t remain there all winter. I need to be moving all day long. I’m going to pack some food and make a break for it. I’m prepared for maximum physical output on a near continual basis. It’s still early in the season. Those mild gaps in the weather early on will help. I have crap shooter confidence that I can do it.

No Kindle, no Nook, No iPad, just those ten books. Remember, you have no electricity, and only a kerosine lamp for light. Being Alaska, you’ll be in the dark for many many hours on end. My choices are based on two things: I’m trying to improve my spanish, and the spanish languages novels and reference books will help with that. It is a very time consuming process, and I could re-read each book as my language skills improve. My pronunciation would be off, but I would be able to read and write it better by the end of this ordeal. Also, I’m a trivia junkie and simply flipping through the OED page after page sounds like heaven to me.

Remember, your cabin also has a supply of writing paper and both a survival manual and a first-aid manual, all found in the steamer trunk. These two books don’t count for your ten, and the paper will allow you to doodle, make lists, write stories or prose, whatever.

Nope, as long as it’s one volume, that’s all that matters. It can be huge, thick, have a dozen different novels printed in it… whatever. As long as it is one single volume. Note the OED from my list is the complete 26 volume print edition in one single book. Same for the complete works of Shakespeare. As long as it is a single book, it counts. Multiple volumes don’t count as one choice. Harry Potter would be 6 separate choices leaving you with four more.

My first list had the complete Poe on it, but I figured it would be too depressing sitting for hours on end, in the dark, reading those stories.

The Red Book of Westmarch
In Search of Lost Time
The Cantebury Tales
The Faerie Queen
Finnegan’s Wake
The Decameron
Thucydides
Herodotus.
The Spirit of the Laws
Democracy In America

It would add such a delicious edge to the cabin fever, though.

Okay, given that that was one of my alternates, assuming that there wasn’t an edition that had the whole thing in one volume… is there an edition that has it all in one volume?

Couldn’t say, haven’t read it it yet.

Funny you should mention this one. I just recently and randomly took out my copy for the first time in maybe…30 years. I have been dipping into it again and revisiting some of my old favorites (Zen View, Old People Everywhere, City Country Fingers, Cascade of Roofs). Also amused at how much sweet hippie sensibility there is in it.

The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Charles Dickens: Five Novels
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson
Jane Austen: Seven Novels
The Lord of the Rings (3-in-1 Omnibus) by J.R.R. Tolkien
Mark Twain: 10 Books in 1
Robert Louis Stevenson–Seven Novels

May not be a definitive collection but I’m confident this will last me through several months of constant reading.

Moving from IMHO to Cafe Society.

Depressing literature has a paradoxical effect on me. Reading about people who are in even worse straits than I am makes me feel better about myself. Poe’s definitely staying on my list :smiley: