[Yossarian]

I've been enjoying some of the suggestions in the Books thread over the past few months. However, with reading time limited by trying to write my own stuff plus the pressures of small children and a falling down house, I thought it would be interesting to force some of you into revealing your absolute favourite books.

If you faced the prospect of getting stuck on a portaledge for a week or two, what 8-10 books would you pack? Feel free to give detailed explanations for your choices...

I'm not totally set on mine yet, but the process of figuring them out is proving quite enjoyable...

So, this is where I've got to...

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Magus - John Fowles
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills
The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker
The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes
George's Marvellous Medicine - Roald Dahl
My Idea of Fun - Will Self
London Fields - Martin Amis

Explanation and revisions to follow...

[Falling Down]

Firstly welcome back - we've missed you.

Secondly - the Richard Rhodes book on the bomb is absolutely brilliant.  One of my "You really should read this" books...

I'll give the challenge some thought.

[jwi]

Do we need stay true to the Big Wall idea? I like The Brothers Karamazov, but if I'd to haul I may select something a bit denser...

* A collection of Jorge Luis Borge's short stories. The more complete the better. As long as it contains “ The Lottery in Babylon”. I can read them again and again.
* The left hand of darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Apart from everything else it also have a very nice description of a trek across the ice. The dispossessed would do as well.
* Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson. Get a lifetime dose of Finnish melancholy in this thin volume.
* The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. Because sometimes the Ivory Tower is all we have
* The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu by Sven Lindqvist, a writer mostly known for “Exterminate all the brutes” and “A history of bombing” wrote this taoism gem in the 60s.
* The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The great Russian novel, wholly without compromises.
* Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov. Because “A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” is not grim enough.
* The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukiko Mishima. How a fascist ultra-nationalist could write this novel, I'll never know.

[andy popp]

I did something like this on FB a couple of years ago and also had a Moomin book too - I think it was Moomin Summer Madness. I'll come back with a fuller list soon.

[Yossarian]

Thank you very much Falling Down - I thought it would be a bit crap if I just started adding to some established threads without first starting something new...

I think the Richard Rhodes book is amazing. As much as I am awed by the Apollo programme, I think that the Manhattan Project (and surrounding work) is even more impressive, and this account is vastly better than any recording of the former.

Just one sliver, like Fermi and Chicago Pile-1, could be a brilliant book on its own.

And it's all so taut - there's a notion of time running out from the first page...

[Yossarian]

JWI - the portaledge is metaphorical and adaptable to your preference...

I was going to add the Brothers K, but I still struggle with the fact that, if I'm honest, I would rather take Bravo Two Zero...

[andy popp]

I think the Richard Rhodes book is amazing. As much as I am awed by the Apollo programme, I think that the Manhattan Project (and surrounding work) is even more impressive, and this account is vastly better than any recording of the former.

I hadn't heard of this but am intrigued now. I was very impressed with American Prometheus, Bird and Sherwin's autobiography of Robert Oppenheimer.

[jwi]

Some people I know in theoretical physics also have spoken well of Rhodes's book

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[jwi]

I did something like this on FB a couple of years ago and also had a Moomin book too - I think it was Moomin Summer Madness. I'll come back with a fuller list soon.

As an aside, I really dislike the English titles for Jansson's Moomin novels. I understand that the marketing department want to put in Moomin there, but the books are not for children anyway and by doing that they loose all the wistfulness of the original

[andy popp]

This is the list I came up when given a similar challenge a couple of years ago:

1. Moominsummer Madness, Tove Jansson.
2. The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne
3. Collected Poems, Theodore Roethke
4. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust.
5. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
6. A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
7. Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
8. Moby Dick, Herman Melville.
9. The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
10. Let's Go Climbing, C.F. Kirkuk.

I might want to make some changes now though ...

[andy popp]

I did something like this on FB a couple of years ago and also had a Moomin book too - I think it was Moomin Summer Madness. I'll come back with a fuller list soon.

As an aside, I really dislike the English titles for Jansson's Moomin novels. I understand that the marketing department want to put in Moomin there, but the books are not for children anyway and by doing that they loose all the wistfulness of the original

I really like a lot of her "adult" fiction too, The Summer Book especially. When I was in Helsinki in summer 2014 there was a superb retrospective of her artwork.

[jwi]

I was going to add the Brothers K, but I still struggle with the fact that, if I'm honest, I would rather take Bravo Two Zero...

The rule is that when you re-read it you can skip the 200 pages of Dimitry drinking (which, incidentally, several Russians have told me is the best bit)



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[Yossarian]

I am going to add The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe to make 10. Not sure how I missed that. I'm not sure it's particularly controversial that I prefer it to his fiction. (Which I do love too - I would probably have chosen A Man in Full over Vanities.)

But anyway, what a story, what a bunch of characters, and what a turn of phrase...

[moose]

Lots of books already chosen that I would plump for myself (either we all have great taste or I am an unimaginitive copycat).  Books currently at the forefront of my mind (another day would see another list) are:

- In Search of Lost Time - Proust (bit of a cheat as it's multi-volume)
- Moby Dick - Melville
- The Player of Games - Iain M Banks
- Vurt - Jeff Noon
- The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe (or possibly In Cold Blood - Capote)
- London Fields - Amis
- Lord of Rings - Tolkien (not because I think it's particularly great but for childhood memories of reading and rereading - it has to be the falling-apart copy I have had since I was 12).
- a random pop-science choice - maybe Godel Escher & Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - being marooned on a ledge might encourage me to finish it!
- random history choice - maybe London, a Biography by Peter Ackroyd or Stalinggrad by Anthony Beevor

[SA Chris]

The prodigal son has returned.

Need to think about response though.

Is this assuming they are books you have read already and would re-read on said portaledge, or books you haven't ready yet that you would take with you to read on the ledge?

[cheque]

London Fields - Martin Amis

This would fit the bill.

[Yossarian]

Chris - very much books you've read before.

I'm quite intrigued by the non-fiction choices. Godet, Escher and Bach - that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to discover.

[TobyD]

If you faced the prospect of getting stuck on a portaledge for a week or two, what 8-10 books would you pack?

In no order:

The god of small things- Arundahti Roy
Kafka on the shore- Haruki Murakami
Northern lights (trilogy) - Phillip Pullman
Journey to the centre of the earth (possibly ...80 days) - Jules Verne
Collected works of John Keats ( or possibly Yeats depending on mood)
Great Apes- Will Self
Paradise Lost - John Milton
The Lost World - AC Doyle
Complete Works Shakespeare (sorry)
Ulysses- James Joyce (not read in its entirety yet)

Do I get the topo for the route I'm on as well?  Otherwise I'd take that instead of Shakespeare!

[petejh]

Big Wall Climbing: Elite Techniques - Jared Ogden
Essays - George Orwell
Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
Two Treatises of Government - John Locke
How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method - George Polya
Why Do I Do That? - Joseph Burgo
Parois de Légende : les plus belles escalades autour du monde - Arnaud Petit & Stephanie Bodet
Yosemite - Alex Huber & Heinz Zak
The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems - Martin Gardner
British Swear Words Colouring Book: Stress Relieving Adult Colouring Book - Outrageous Katie
A copy of Penthouse, any issue.

[andy_e]

Yosemite - Alex Huber & Heinz Zak

This is an incredible book! My local library had a copy when I was a kid, inspiring stuff!

[andy popp]

I'm going to replace Kirkus with Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don and use Kirkus as the basis for a non-fiction list. So,

Let's Go Climbing, C.F. Kirkus
Omnibus, Kurt Diemberger
One of John Muir’s books, maybe My First Summer in the Sierra
Walden, or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau
The Confessions, Aleister Crowley
The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
Just Send Me Word, Orlando Figes (or Your Death Would be Mine, Martha Hanna)
Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Tony Judt (or The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark)
The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg
Selected Letters, John Keats

[Yossarian]

Good thinking - let's separate fiction and non-fiction...

[Rocksteady]

If it's an infinite portaledge relying on tried and tested multiple re-reads with pleasure and I can count series as one I'll go with the following:

Dune - Frank Herbert
The Wheel of Time sequence - Robert Jordan (potentially would swap with Lord of the Rings)
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen - Alan Garner (might swap with Susanne Cooper's Dark is Rising Sequence)
The Flashman series - George MacDonald Fraser
The Aubrey-Maturin series - Patrick O'Brian
The Warlord Trilogy - Bernard Cornwell
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Luo Guanzhong
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Worst Journey In the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

I suspect some other books I've read more recently will repay re-reading, including Proust and Winged Victory by VM Yeates.

[lagerstarfish]

obviously you're all taking A Manual of Modern Rope Techniques by Nigel Shepherd to start with

[Yossarian]

Rather like Desert Island Discs, I think that is included with the portaledge. On the basis that it's soft, strong and thoroughly absorbent...