The challenge of creating a zero-sum book collection
Schwable describes the one hundred books his friend left behind after his death as a “remarkable portrait of his life: an autobiography composed not of sentences but of books.”
As an inveterate book squirrel, I tried to imagine myself retaining a set number of published works while ousting the rest. I’m not being melodramatic when I tell you the thought induced in me the need for a strong cup of tea. I was nevertheless keen to see if I could at least create such a library in my head: one consisting of books which, for a variety of reasons, meant a great deal to me. It turned out that I could, although I suspect there may already be changes afoot as I cling to old favourites in a most disgraceful manner.
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Should any of you wish to attempt this challenge, there are a few rules (well, suggestions):
a) You may add up to 100 books (fiction or non-fiction) to your figmental collection.
b) Titles may be added or removed at any point, but the number of individual books on your virtual shelf must never exceed 100, i.e. one in, one out. Alternatively, you may set the size of your library at (for instance) 50 or 30. The choice is entirely your own.
c) You can include an author’s collected works (or a series) on your shelf provided it has at some point genuinely been published in a single volume.
d) This isn’t meant to be a list of great titles or the most highbrow books you have read. Indeed, your choices don’t have to be particularly well-known. Please include only published works (it doesn’t matter if they are out of print) that have been significant to you in some way during your life. Books holding your most powerful memories.
e) Please include a link back to this post (I would love to know who, if anyone, takes on this challenge).
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My Virtual Book Stash (in alphabetical order):
1. 84 Charing Cross Road – Helene Hanff
2. The 101 Dalmatians – Dodie Smith
3. A Few Figs from Thistles – Edna St. Vincent Millay
4. A Land – Jacquetta Hawkes
5. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
6. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
7. A Sketchbook of Birds – C.F. Tunnicliffe
8. Aesop’s Fables – Aesop
9. After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets – Eavan Boland
10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
11. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
12. Animal Farm – George Orwell
13. Ariel – Sylvia Plath
14. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – Laurie Lee
15. At Your Own Risk – Derek Jarman
16. Bad Blood – Lorna Sage
17. La Bâtarde – Violette Leduc
18. The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
19. Before Night Falls – Reinaldo Arenas
20. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
21. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
22. The Children’s Book – A.S. Byatt
23. The Complete Maus – Art Spiegelman
24. Corfu Trilogy – Gerald Durrell
25. The Country Under My Skin – Gioconda Belli
26. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber
27. Deaths and Entrances – Dylan Thomas
28. The Diary of Samuel Pepys
29. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
30. Doctor Glas – Hjalmar Söderberg
31. Good-bye to All That – Robert Graves
32. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer
33. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
34. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
35. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J.K. Rowling
36. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
37. I, Claudius – Robert Graves
38. I Know My Own Heart – Anne Lister
39. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
40. If This is a Man – Primo Levi
41. If This is a Woman – Sarah Helm
42. The Iliad – Homer
43. The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature – Margaret E. Martignoni
44. Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
45. The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
46. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
47. Matilda – Roald Dahl
48. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter – Simone de Beauvoir
49. The Merchant of Venice – William Shakespeare
50. Moominland Midwinter – Tove Jansson
51. Moominsummer Madness – Tove Jansson
52. The Naked Civil Servant – Quentin Crisp
53. Neurotribes – Steve Silberman
54. The Night Watch – Sarah Waters
55. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
56. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
57. Not Waving But Drowning – Stevie Smith
58. The Old Possum Book of Practical Cats – T.S. Eliot
59. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
60. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
61. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
62. The Orton Diaries – Joe Orton
63. The Outrun – Amy Liptrot
64. Passion – Jude Morgan
65. Perfume – Patrick Suskind
66. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
67. A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary – Voltaire
68. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – Dylan Thomas
69. Possession – A.S. Byatt
70. The Postman of Nagasaki – Peter Townsend
71. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
72. Reuben Sachs – Amy Levy
73. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
74. Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi
75. The Regeneration Trilogy – Pat Barker
76. Resistance – Agnes Hume
77. Rimbaud: Poems – Arthur Rimbaud
78. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
79. Rubyfruit Jungle – Rita Mae Brown
80. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ – Sue Townsend
81. Seven Roads to Happiness – Desmond Marwood
82. The Silent World – Jacques-Yves Cousteau
83. Silly Verse for Kids – Spike Milligan
84. Solo’s Journey – Joy Smith Aiken
85. Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
86. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
87. The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
88. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
89. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
90. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words – Boel Westin
91. The Truce – Primo Levi
92. Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas
93. Voyage of the Beagle – Charles Darwin
94. The Water Babies – Charles Kingsley
95. Whale Nation – Heathcote Williams
96. The Woman’s Room – Marilyn French
97. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
98. Writing Home – Alan Bennett
99. Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
100. Yentl the Yeshiva Boy – Isaac Bashevis Singer
Other Bloggers Taking Part:
- A Hundred Books – Desperate Reader
- My 100-Book-Library – Literary Hoarders
- My One-Hundred Book Library – A Life in Books
- My new Desert Island Library – 100 Books – Annabookbel