Bob’s 2020 Twenty Five Favourites for a Desert Island

Selection Guidelines

• This is writing I would want to take to a desert island. Not “Best Writing”. I couldn't identify “best” writing if it fell on my head.

• The list is cumulative, from 1813 to so far in 2020.

• As I reviewed my selections, I must confess some inclusions surprised me. I mean, really, how long can a person hang onto Salinger's work even given its impact on a young man's imagination all those years ago? And, I must admit I have included Robertson Davies mostly because I wasn't aware there were any Canadian writers until I read him. But, on a desert island, the re-discovery of that memory would make me smile.

• None of my writing colleagues are here. Many deserve to be. I am routinely impressed, educated, humbled, and encouraged by their work. Between you and me, I will confide to you I plan to sneak two or three bags of their writing onto my desert island. In plain brown wrappers.

• There is also an extensive list of authors and their works that I found painful to exclude. What a wonderful problem! What a rich world of the written word we live in.

1. Andre Alexis Fifteen Dogs – novel 2015
2. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice – novel 1813
3. Lord Byron (George Gordon) So We’ll Go No More A-Roving – poem 1830
4. Billy Collins Fishing on the Susquehanna in July – poem 1998
5. Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy – Fifth Business 1970 and two other novels – 1975
6. Charles Dickens Great Expectations-- novel 1861
7. Emily Dickinson A Bird Came Down the Walk – poem 1891
8. F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby – novel 1925
9. Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – nonfiction 2015
10. Ernest Hemingway Death in the Afternoon – nonfiction 1932
11. Stephen Leacock My Financial Career – short story 1910 (from Literary Lapses)
12. James Henry Leigh Hunt Jenny Kissed Me – poem 1838
13. Alice Munro Lives of Girls and Women – interrelated short stories/novel 1971
14. Simon Rich The Ride Back to Beersheba – flash fiction 2007 (from Ant Farm . . . Situations)
15. J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye – novel 1951
16. Julie Schumacher Dear Committee Members – novel 2014
17. William Shakespeare Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116) poem 1609
18. Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – novel 1960
19. J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings – novel (six books published in three volumes) 1954/55
20. John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces – novel 1980
21. Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – novel 1885
22. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five – novel 1969
23. Mo Willems Waiting Is Not Easy – picture book 2014
24. Kevin Wilson Nothing To See Here – novel 2019
25. W. B. Yeats When You Are Old – poem 1893

389