Zendegi discussion

When you've read Zendegi, you'll probably remember this passage:

"Then he found an empty packing box and took it to the English language section. Javeed would have ten million electronic books to choose from, but Martin still wanted to pass on something from his own century. From the novels he picked out The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five; from non-fiction, The Diary of Anne Frank, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Gulag Archipelago. He was tempted to go on and fill the box to its rim, but once he started fretting over omissions he knew there’d be no end to it."

Okay, I agree they're all good books. Very worthy. But- if your dear departed father left you a box of books like that, wouldn't you say he was a bit - emo? Isn't the overall effect a teensy bit bleak? He's basically telling his kid: 'life sucks, then you die.' Sheesh, Martin...

So this got me thinking me thinking what seven books I would put in such a box. How about all of you out there in Goodreadsland?




and...

My books, keeping to Martin's balance of fiction/non-fiction and English/translations-into-English, are these:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain
Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore - Sheri S. Tepper
The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
Diaspora - Greg Egan

Selected essays 1934-1943 - Simone Weil
St Thomas Aquinas - G. K. Chesterton
How to Make our Ideas Clear - Charles Peirce

Each of those fiction books has a good mix of comedy and tragedy, profound thinky bits and purely exhilarating entertaining bits, and breathes something of the potential of the sentient spirit, despite being written by wildly different people with wildly different ideas. IMHO.

For the non-fiction, Weil and Chesterton both write about the battle for the soul of Languedoc. The worldviews they approach it with are diametrically opposed. They disagree about absolutely everything in European history. But, they are both clear, logical, passionate, uplifting, and convincing in their arguments that there were truths and beauties in Mediaeval civilisation that modern civilisation has lost to our detriment. Together they provide a sense of perspective that will do Javeed a lot better service than a focus at the maggoty horrors of the 20th century. And to complete the balance, Peirce gives a razor-sharp exposition of the one thing in our civilisation that makes it unequivocally better than the old days. He, too, is clear, logical, passionate and uplifting.

Martin is kind of a tool, although I guess he was trying. My list would be tricky, because a lot of things that have stayed with me are on the dark side. Also it would be unlikely to include any non-fiction because it so rarely resonates with me (heathen, I know) and probably not that much translated stuff because my formative reading was pretty parochial. It would certainly include:

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Something by Pratchett (probably Good Omens or Small Gods)
V for Vendetta - Moore and Lloyd
if on a winter's night a traveller - Italo Calvino
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre
Any of the Vorkosigan books except Mirror Dance because it's a bit on the miserable side - Lois McMaster Bujold

I was going to finish the list with Dune, which is my favourite book a lot of the time, but actually I'll go with The Stars My Destination, which I think is a better gateway drug for science fiction.

(I would love to include some Iain Banks but my favourites of his (Use of Weapons, Complicity, Excession) are all pretty bleak.)

Each of those books would open a door into the kinds of fiction I care most about, though of course behind each items there's a hundred other things that could replace them.