My 100 book library

What would be in your library if you could only keep 100 books?

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Reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals made me think of this. The Wordsworths had a small library at Dove Cottage and would read from Milton and Shakespeare of an evening. And read them again. And again. All the time gaining familiarity and picking up nuances. Understanding the text better with each read. Discussing differences of opinion. Being inspired by lines which perhaps did not jump out on the first read.

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So I asked myself, which books would I keep, if limited to 100. Where to even begin?

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I began by thinking of the books I have reread most often. These have stood the test of time, and yielded more with each reread. Re-reading bears fruit because we change. “No two persons ever read the same book,” said Edmund Wilson and we are not the same person as we were ten years ago, twenty years ago, etc. Italo Calvino wrote “Books remain the same, but we certainly have changed, and this later encounter is therefore completely new.”

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My most frequently reread books are:

📗 The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien

📙 The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

📕 Villette, by Charlotte Brontë, and

📘 The Cider House Rules, by John Irving

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These are layered, meaningful and strangely comforting reads. Like revisiting a town you know well, and seeing familiar faces. Rereads would play a vital part in selecting a 100 book library. Why take the risk on an unknown book (unless you are perhaps under 30 and still have many renowned books to read).

My guiding principles

In making my choices, I very much had Dorothy Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage experience in my mind. No television, no smart phones, no public library, no radio, etc.

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I also assumed a level of personal previous knowledge, i.e. I wouldn’t need a cookbook, or a book on how to make jams and preserves, as I already know how to do this.

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Despite being fairly good at DIY, I would take a general DIY book with me though. This is because I often refer to YouTube how to guides when doing DIY. Without YouTube, I’d like to check a book for guidance.

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The next question is which books would be most use in isolation? If you pick a novel, it would have to be one that bears re-reading, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth taking.

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(I have made some cheeky assumptions that some trilogies would be available as single volumes)

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As for fiction versus non-fiction, beyond essential information, it is a question of which one is going to inspire, be most thought-provoking, and most likely to fire the synapses. I’ve picked a blend, but quite a lot of fiction. Because fiction is usually open to interpretation, and has layers, it can often give more on each reread than non-fiction.

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And poetry, putting into words “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” (Alexander Pope) - literature’s reach for the sublime. It not only bears re-reading, but it is wonderful to read aloud, and fun to memorise.

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So here’s my 100 book library.

1 Albatross book of English verse (this sits on my shelf and is an excellent compendium)

2 Penguin book of short stories (I have this, as yet unread)

3 Hamlet (or complete works of Shakespeare if allowed)

4 The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (because I’ve only read it once and it’s long!)

5 Villette, Charlotte Brontë

6 Just Kids, Patti Smith

7 A Moomin omnibus, Tove Jansson

8 Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

9 Wolf Hall trilogy, Hilary Mantel

10 Girl Woman Other, Bernadine Evaristo

11 Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens (because I’ve only read it once, unlike many of his others which are my favourites)

12 A Shropshire Lad, AE Housman

13 Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

14 Poetry of Langston Hughes

15 Poetry of Emily Brontë

16 Dream Work, Mary Oliver

17 Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

18 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s collected works

19 No Future without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu

20 Dumas biography, A Craig Bell

21 Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes

22 The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse

23 Every day nature, Andy Beer

24 Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

25 Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery

26 O the Brave Music, Dorothy Evelyn Smith

27 D’Artagnan romances, Alexandre Dumas

28 A Month in the Country, JL Carr

29 A ‘teach yourself French’ book

30 Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf

31 Prairie Trilogy, Willa Cather

32 Underland, Robert Macfarlane

33 Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

34 Homer’s Odyssey

35 Beowulf, Seamus Heaney translation

36 Going to meet the man, James Baldwin

37 Lyrics, 1962-2001, Bob Dylan

38 Romola, George Eliot

39 Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell

40 Don Quixote, Cervantes

41 Kristen Lavrensdatter stories, Sigrid Undset

42 Chekhov’s great plays

43 The Cider House Rules, John Irving

44 Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

45 Essays of Michel de Montaigne

46 Handbook of Russian literature

47 Cambridge guide to literature in English

48 Guide to French literature

49. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

50. Middlemarch by George Eliot

51. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges

52. Martin Eden, Jack London

53. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

54. The Common Reader 1+2, Virginia Woolf

55. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

56. Oxford English Dictionary

57. RSPB Wildlife of Britain

58. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals

59. The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

60. Endurance, Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing

61. A Room with a View, EM Forster

62. Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker

63. A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel

64. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

65. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

66. Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon

67. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

68. Zigzag Street, Nick Earls

69. Pollyanna, Eleanor Porter

70. Restoration, Rose Tremain

71. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

72. Two sides of the moon, David Scott/Alexei Leonov

73. A Fortunate Life, by AB Facey

74. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands

75. Dandy in the Underworld, by Sebastian Horsley

76. Selected poems, Pablo Neruda

77. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai

78. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

79. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

80. Never let me go, Kazuo Ishiguro

81. Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu

82. Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

83. Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

84. We have always lived in the castle, Shirley Jackson

85. We should all be feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

86. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

87. The autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Gertrude Stein

88. All quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque

89. House at Pooh Corner, AA Milne

90. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler

91. Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry

92. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

93. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

94. A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz

95. Black History for every day of the year, David Olusuga

96. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

97. Alan Grant stories, Josephine Tey

98. The Cambridge Encyclopedia

99. A general DIY manual

100. Advice on Dying: And Living a Better Life, Dalai Lama XIV

What do you think of that lot then?

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