here's my list: Complete Plays and Sonnets of Shakespeare, Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Livy's History of Rome, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and the Fantastic Four Omnibus 1 & 2 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Was tempting to go with this list instead: King James Bible, Complete Poems and Short Stories of Edgar Allen Poe, Plutarch's Lives, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and the SpiderMan Omnibus by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

third alternate: Milton's Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained, Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, The Snopes Trilogy by William Faulkner, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and The Complete Peanuts by Charles M/ Schulz.

Penthouse Letters.

This is one of those things where, to certain people, you can look like a complete Cretin if you're honest.

Who cares?

Atlas Shrugged by A. Rand
The Source by J. Michener
The Bible (working your way through Chronicles can make coconut gathering look like fun)

And I'll steal two from above because they look like a really good idea:

History of Rome & The Complete Willie S.

"Lord! What Fools these Mortals be!"

the divine comedy - a bilingual edition that will more than keep me busy. Also Little Big Man by Thomas Berger and umm let's see. Oh yeah, a copy of Playboy.

the divine comedy - a bilingual edition that will more than keep me busy. Also Little Big Man by Thomas Berger and umm let's see. Oh yeah, a copy of Playboy.

Sookie Stackhouse vampire series by Charlaine Harris
and maybe Pride and Prejudice

The Trial (Kafka)
The Tartar Steppe (Buzzati)
Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)
Hebdomeros (DeChirico)
Neuromancer (Gibson)

The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
Slaughterhouse Five - Vonnegut
Sombrero Fallout - Richard Brautigan

The premiss is "and only had room for five books", so I'm going to take the operative word as "room" and cheat a little with drawing supplies:
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards;
Webster's Collegiate Dictionary w etymology/language origins charts;
a 500-page pad of drawing paper;
a cigar box of wooden pencils and a sharpener;
The Last Whole Earth Catalog, by Stewart Brand.

A different group of books would be
[still] Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain;
[still] the drawing pad and the pencils;
[still] The Last Whole Earth Catalog;
and the Boy Scout Handbook or the Webelos Handbook.
This leaves me no room for the enjoyment of fiction or etymology. Wait--The Last Whole Earth Catalog has a serialized book in it.

For fiction, I guess I would substitute a World History book for half the paper & pencils. ha ha.

A fun history read is William Manchester's "The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972".

"All I know is just what I read in the newspapers." - Will Rogers

hmmmm.....

Dante's Divine Comedy (bilingual, but I'd spend my time reading the original Italian)

The complete Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan-Doyle

The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien (yes, I have a red-leather-bound single book of the entire story, not cheap)

Swiss Family Robinson (hey, it's a *desert* island....whaddya gonna eat, how ya gonna live?)

Bhagavad Gita--a religious book is a must, but I'm tired of Judeo-Christian-Muslim dogma...time for something very different

-5.75,-4.05
"God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time." -- Robin Williams

would be "Survival On A Desert Island".

After that it'd be "How To Build A Raft" and "Navigation for Dummies".

I'm not sure I'd have much leisure time left after that.

The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
The Dancing Wu Li Masters - Gary Zukav
The Way of Chuang Tzu - Thomas Merton
Hyperion 1st & 2nd books - Dan Simmons

;)

An interlinear bible = finally time to learn hebrew and greek
Lord of the Rings
Neuromancer
Pride and Prejudice
The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia
The book thief
and a pre-publication copy of Beautiful Malice..

* Boy Scouts guide to survival
* Book of matches (clever Tina!)
* Lord of the Rings
* Book of nautical maps
* An almanac for the area

I'd trade them all (well, except maybe the matches) for a good, sharp knife.

1) Do-It-Yourself Storytelling
2) Wilderness Survival Guide (the island edition)
3) Tool Making
4) Boat Building For Dummies
5) Navigation
_{Don't confuse my willingness to accommodate with your own need for me to obey.}

"His Dark Materials" - Philip Pullman
"The Dangerous Book for Boys"
"Moby Dick" - might keep me busy for awhile
An encylopedic book on hallucinogenic plants, on the off chance I would find one of them growing on the island.

Other than that, I can't read a book twice or see a movie twice. I may read Pullman again.

The Lord of the Rings movies are far too gay for my taste; I read the book in 6th grade and was not sensitive at that point.

"Turning Japanese I think I'm Turning Japanese I really think so da-da-da det det det det" - The Vapors

Plato's Complete Works
The Upanishads
The Tao Te Ching
The Brothers Karamzaov
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats

Agree with Sean Paul on the Yeats (Frost was tempting, too). Been meaning to read Brothers K. Although I've read some Plato, those 1800 pages and the Hindus and Chinese would keep me going a year.

Tom Robinson