My One-Hundred-Book Library

The challenge of creating a zero-sum book collection

If you own a copy of Will Schwable’s Books for Living, please turn to page 183 where you will find a chapter entitled ‘Song of Solomon: Admiring Greatness’. Here the author writes of a close friend who “loved books passionately” and “amassed a great collection” during his life. Upon reaching the age of 80, however, he decided to “keep exactly one hundred books” and no more. He proceeded to give away most of his voluminous library and remained true to his resolution for the rest of his days, He hung on only to those that held meaning for him and the rest were rehomed.

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 WomenPoets – Eavan Boland
10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
11. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
12. All the Lives We Ever Lived – Katharine Smyth
13. Animal Farm – George Orwell
14. Ariel – Sylvia Plath
15. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – Laurie Lee
16. At Your Own Risk – Derek Jarman
17. Bad Blood – Lorna Sage
18. La Bâtarde – Violette Leduc
19. The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
20. Before Night Falls – Reinaldo Arenas
21. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
22. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
23. The Children’s Book – A.S. Byatt
24. The Complete Maus – Art Spiegelman
25. Corfu Trilogy – Gerald Durrell
26. The Country Under My Skin – Gioconda Belli
27. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber
28. Deaths and Entrances – Dylan Thomas
29. The Diary of Samuel Pepys
30. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
31. Doctor Glas – Hjalmar Söderberg
32. Good-bye to All That – Robert Graves
33. Fair Play – Tove Jansson
34. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer
35. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
36. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
37. Harry Potter: The Complete Collection – J.K. Rowling
38. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
39. I, Claudius – Robert Graves
40. I Know My Own Heart – Anne Lister
41. If This is a Man – Primo Levi
42. If This is a Woman– Sarah Helm
43. The Iliad – Homer
44. The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature – Margaret E. Martignoni
45. Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
46. The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
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. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
53. The Naked Civil Servant – Quentin Crisp
54. Neurotribes – Steve Silberman
55. The Night Watch – Sarah Waters
56. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
57. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
58. Not Waving But Drowning – Stevie Smith
59. The Old Possum Book of Practical Cats – T.S. Eliot
60. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
61. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
62. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
63. The Orton Diaries – Joe Orton
64. The Outrun – Amy Liptrot
65. Passion – Jude Morgan
66. Perfume – Patrick Suskind
67. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
68. A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary – Voltaire
69. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – Dylan Thomas
70. Possession – A.S. Byatt
71. The Postman of Nagasaki – Peter Townsend
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
73. Reuben Sachs – Amy Levy
74. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
75. Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi
76. The Regeneration Trilogy – Pat Barker
77. Resistance – Agnes Hume
78. Rimbaud: Poems – Arthur Rimbaud
79. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
80. Rubyfruit Jungle – Rita Mae Brown
81. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ – Sue Townsend
82. Seven Roads to Happiness – Desmond Marwood
83. The Silent World – Jacques-Yves Cousteau
84. Silly Verse for Kids – Spike Milligan
85. Solo’s Journey – Joy Smith Aiken
86. Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
87. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
88. The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
89. Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
90. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
91. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words – Boel Westin
92. The Truce – Primo Levi
93. Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas
94. Voyage of the Beagle – Charles Darwin
95. The Water Babies – Charles Kingsley
96. Whale Nation – Heathcote Williams
97. The Woman’s Room – Marilyn French
98. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
99. Writing Home – Alan Bennett
100. Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson

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

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