Books On Which to Build a Civilization: The Thursday Night Bar Fight Results
As many of you know, this week’s Thursday Night Bar Fight was a Survivor-like game where readers had to hash out which three books should be taken to a deserted island to build the culture of a new civilization.
The rules were simple: Make a pitch for three books, make a case against others’ choices, and/or add your votes to others’ suggestions. According to the scenario, basic How-To and survival guides were already guaranteed to be on the island; I therefore chose not to count nominations such as books of how to build simple machines or the Boy Scout Handbook. Books that were technically How-To books but were clearly being brought for other reasons, such as the Kama Sutra, were allowed. Also, I chose to count any nomination that wasn’t named by title where such a book clearly existed, such as “a book that has all of Shakespeare’s works;” however, I did not count a general appeal to an author or genre, such as “something by Terry Pratchett.” Lastly, if you kept nominating books, once you got past 10 I stopped acknowledging the newer entries, unless someone else also nominated that title.
The scoring was somewhat complicated and, I admit, subjective, but it went like this: A book named received a point for each person that nominated that book. An additional point was granted if another reader added positive reinforcement to the title, such as “great choice!” However, a point would be taken away for that title if another reader gave an objection or voiced a negative reaction to book. For example, the book that received the most votes – The Bible – also received the most objections and negative comments, and thus missed the cut.
It turned out there was a tie, and so rather than having three books to take on our tropical island paradise we will instead have four. Those four, in order of total score, are:
- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare (7 points)
- The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, Sandra M. Gilbert, Editor (5 points)
- Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton (3 points)
- Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (3 points)
Other notes of interest:
- A total of 61 individual books were nominated
- The League likes tradition: 44% of the works nominated were written prior to the 20th century
- The League also likes to be modern: over 20% of the books were written since 1980.
- Only two writers had more than one work nominated; those were Plato and Ken Follet. (Though it should be noted that Follet’s two works were each nominated by the same person).
- The biggest category was definitely Fiction & Literature, which snagged over 40% of the nominations.
- Philosophy was the next largest, with 18%.
- There were 8 nominations for books on math or science, 4 religious works, 2 comic books, and 1 children’s poetry book.
- This being the Internet, it should surprise no one that Sci-Fi/Fantasy did better than it might have done elsewhere, with 7 nominations.
Here is a complete list of the nominees:
Scarne’s New Complete Guide to Gambling, John Scarne
The Feyman Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Gerald M. Weinberg
The Odyssey, Homer
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Prince, Machiavelli
A Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell
Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, Sandra M. Gilbert, Editor
Reasonable Rhymes for the Very Young, Arnold Lobel, Editor
Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofsadter
Ethics, Plato
The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
Two New Sciences, by Galileo Galilei
Skeptical Chymist, or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes, Robert Boyle
Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton
The Calculus of Consent, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock
The Republic, Plato
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Jack Kirby
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
The Bible
The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grimm
Introduction to the Devout Life, Francis De Sales, John K. Ryan
The Rembrandt Book, Gary Schwartz, Editor
The Jane Austin Anthology, Jane Austin
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, Breece D’J Pancake
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson
The Collected Works of T.S. Elliot, T. S. Elliot
Democracy, Joan Didion
The Reconstructionist Jewish Prayer Book
Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet, Skip Williams
The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong
The Diary of Lady Murasaki, Murasaki Shikibu
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
A Vindication of the Right’s of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follet
World Without End, Ken Follet
The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Without Feathers, Woody Allen
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Blue Lagoon, Henry De Vere Stacpoole
Collapse, Jared Diamond
Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut
Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana
Walden, Henry Thoreau
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Plutarch
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
Twenty-Two Foreigners in Funny Shorts, Pete Davies
The Calvin & Hobbes Anthology, Bill Waterson
The Lovecraft Omnibus, H.P. Lovecraft
Thanks again to everyone that played.
Quibble: The Newton work is called, in full, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or, for short, Principia. Principia Mathematica is Russell and Whitehead’s work on the logical foundations of mathematics.Report
Oh, God. Look, Newton is important from a historical perspective. But unless the original “all the how-to things are otherwise covered” premise included decent modern math and mechanics texts, it’s a terrible choice. Consider just the calculus end of things. Outside of economics, his notation lost out to Leibniz from the beginning (and Britain’s refusal to adopt Leibniz’s notation put them in second-class status in analysis for more than a century). Over the period of roughly 1830-1850, the mathematicians tossed his entire development in favor of one based on set theory and limits, which could be extended. Other than the historical perspective, it’s a terrible choice.Report
So I was thinking of the Russell and Whitehead work…not Newton’s.Report
Honestly Newton’s thing while historically nice, wouldn’t be as useful…in fact I’d say Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle would tell us more about the Newton/Leibniz and calculus debate than their work actually would…Report
What Michael said about Newton applies to Russell and Whitehead. It’s a pioneering work, but it’s not an approach to set theory that anyone uses these days, since it’s clumsy and over-complicated. And their notation is obsolete among mathematicians, though philosophers like Rose still use it.Report
So, if they want something that shows the broad sweep of mathematics/science/engineering, what do we give them? Maybe Ball’s A Short Account of the History of Mathematics? Obviously it doesn’t cover the 20th century, and I always found it a bit dull and over-emphasizing analysis, but it does provide a view of the grandeur of that aspect of human creativity. Bell’s Men of Mathematics? It’s historical accuracy is at least as good as Shakespeare’s, right? What’s the equivalent of those for engineering? Is Burke’s Connections (the book) anywhere near as informative and entertaining as the series?Report
Civilization is doomed, because my proposals didn’t make the cut. I may as well throw myself overboard. 😉
Next week’s barfight: Did Tod use the right vote-counting method, or should he have used a Borda count?Report
I am not a trustworthy person when it comes to recalling names.
The book of children’s poetry:
Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young edited by Jack Prelutsky; I believe I said Arnold Lobel.Report
I’m impressed with the second choice, given that I’d wager somewhere between 75% and 90% of our commenters are male.
Rather surprised no works of economics made it on, considering many site members’ interest in economics, but the voting method favours the less controversial picks.
The Count of Monte Cristo – Nominated to inspire the people on to get off the island and exact dire revenge on whoever sent them there, I suppose?Report
When fleeing a sinking ship, signaling one’s feminist credentials should be a top priority.Report
Maybe not signaling so much as the expression of apprehension about an otherwise existing eventuality?Report
Women and children first.Report
Because lord knows we only read women’s writing to signal our feminist credentials… it’s not like there is any ACTUAL value to their work.Report
Of course there is. But if you only get to take three books, taking an anthology whose selection criteria filter out the majority of prime candidates based on the sex of the author strikes me as a pretty weak choice. Unless, of course, you’re more concerned with ideology or signaling than with literary quality.Report
So, by my count that’s one book of four written entirely by women, three of four written entirely by men.
What percentage do we need to get that 25% down to in order for it to no longer be feminist signaling?Report
I found a table of contents at http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail-contents.aspx?ID=11623 . And it’s ridiculous. Who’d want to read anything by one of these people:
* APHRA BEHN
* MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
* JANE AUSTEN
* MARY SHELLEY
* ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
* CHARLOTTE BRONTË
* EMILY DICKINSON
* EMILY BRONTË
* GEORGE ELIOT
* CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
* EMMA LAZARUS
* EDITH WHARTON
* WILLA CATHER
* AMY LOWELL
* VIRGINIA WOOLF
* ISAK DINESEN
* HILDA DOOLITTLE
* MARIANNE MOORE
* KATHERINE MANSFIELD
* KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
* EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
* DOROTHY PARKER
* ANAÏS NIN
* EUDORA WELTY
* MARY McCARTHY
* JAMES TIPTREE JR. (AKA Alice Sheldon)
* CARSON McCULLERS
* NADINE GORDIMER
* FLANNERY O’CONNOR
* URSULA K. LE GUIN
* JOYCE CAROL OATES
* MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
* ALICE WALKER
* OCTAVIA BUTLER
except as a matter of feminist signaling.Report
Interesting how they gave Alice Sheldon’s real name, but not Mary Ann Evans, and Emily Bronte is just listed under her real name rather than her pen name.Report
Honestly, looking over that list of names, I can’t imagine anyone would consider them 1/3 of the finest of human culture.Report
Better than Faulkner. Better than most novelizations 100 years prior (the hunchback of notre dame, for instance).Report
Yikes. I wouldn’t bring Faulkner unless we needed kindling.Report
Now you’ve done it. 🙂
Seriously, Faulkner was the great American writer of the first half of the 20th Century, beating out, among others, dos Passos, Hemingway, Lewis, Steinbeck, O’Hara, and Fitzgerald.Report
On the subject of Fitzgerald, I was a little surprised that there were no votes for Gatsby.Report
It’s a great book, but not one I find endlessly re-readable (which is what you’d want on a desert island.) Hey, how about Finnegans Wake? You can spend a week on a single page of that.Report
OK, Mike, I probably overdid it on the Faulkner-hate. It’s the Catch-22 of reading: you probably shouldn’t be allowed to comment on anything you read before you were 30, but reading time becomse so precious then that you can’t go back and reread the authors that didn’t impress you.Report
At least until the kids leave the house; then you have all sorts of time, I’m finding.Report
No Victor Hugo bashing please.Report
Why not? 30+ page discourses on medieval architecture do not belong in novels!
(to be fair, I’m sure it was in style at the time. We’ve Improved!)Report
Jane Austen’s OK, but she’s no David Foster Wallace.Report
I don’t think that is the complete list, either. Wikipedia indicated 200+ authors in the latest edition.Report
They’re just the writers I knew. The full list goes back to early medieval times.Report
I dunno… as I understand it, this particular anthology contains over 200+ authors, many of them hugely influential. Given that you are limited to three books, such a selection serves to effectively multiply what you retain many times over. I’m not a bibliophile and can’t speak to whether or not a similar collection exists that does not limit itself to female writers, but absent one of the same quality as that which is suggested here, it seems that the book was just as likely, if not moreso, chosen on its merits than for any reason related to signaling.
For me, your immediate jump to such a conclusion is more instructive of your signaling than any of the people who suggested it.Report
There are other Norton Anthologies that are not just comprised of women writers, though this particular anthology was quite good. I think the initial question may have been better if collected works were not allowed.
“Only two writers had more than one work nominated; those were Plato and Ken Follet. (Though it should be noted that Follet’s two works were each nominated by the same person).”
Shakespeare definitely had more than one work nominated. It’d have been more interesting to force people to pick between Hamlet or The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale or something.
If you’re trying to repopulate the world, you’d think you’d want to know the perspective of women, which other than from a couple of female commenters here, tends to be absent from the League. If you want to know why women seem to love Jane Austen and other female writers, it’s not because the writers were women, but because they have a perspective male writers lack. A book I absolutely can’t stand, Pride and Prejudice, was listed as a favorite book in my high school by a lot more female classmates than I ever expected. Jane Eyre was on that list also. And if you’re trying to rebuild a world….Report
You might try reading Austen again. Rose, who’s quite a fan, says that Austen is quite a bit more fun when you grow up a bit.Report
Kim, I just find that style of social satire very dull.
My eyes glaze over waiting for the funny bits.Report
*nods* it’s not for everyone. Not terribly my cup of tea either.
But it’s /really/ not for teenagers!Report
Bob2,
Personally, I felt like anthologies were sort of cheating. They seemed to violate the spirit of the question, as I read it, since they made a difficult choice slightly easier. However, it was Tod’s question so whatever works for him, works for me.Report
Unless, of course, you’re more concerned with ideology or signaling than with literary quality.
False dichotomy.
The entire publishing industry from right about the written word until a few decades ago pre-filtered out almost all of the women. They were excluded probably mostly on ideology.
(Never mind that the Norton Anthology selected includes a whole bunch of people selected on literary quality)
Geeze, dude, I like many of your contributions but this is a pretty petty comment.Report
Tangentially, for my money, a given author’s body of work speaks for itself. I understand and appreciate what women bring to the table, but once it’s on the table, like any other work of art, it takes on a life of its own.
The author has done her job, his job, whatever. Frankenstein, for all the retelling of that story in various forms, is written by a woman. I’m not alone in seeing Mary Shelley describing her husband Percy Shelley, or how she couches herself in the preface:
How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?
Long ago, I wrote a paper about Mary Shelley. I asked several women in my class about their interpretation of Frankenstein. Every single one of them saw a woman describing a man. In real life, Percy Shelley had a child he did not love. Mary Shelley gave birth to his premature baby and Percy scarpered off to have an affair. Percy Shelley was truly an uncaring creator and many people who once loved him came to bitterly hate him.
Women, at least the women I interviewed, grasped this immediately. Why don’t men, I wonder?Report
Patrick, can you back that comment up? It may not have been easy for women authors to be successful, but there have been a lot of them.
You seem to be saying that all cultures agreed to ban women authors on the basis of the women’s ideology, or on the basis of the cultures’ ideology, but I don’t think that either idea stands. All women authors don’t share an ideology; all cultures don’t share an ideology. Ideologies are notoriouslly inflexible, so the fact that some women authors made it through the gauntlet means that it’s unlikely that an ideology was their primary difficulty. I think that the historical literacy rates of men and women explain much of the difference in publication.Report
Pinky, what Patrick is saying isn’t all that controversial.
He can defend himself on his points, but on the history, with few exceptions, women writers weren’t particularly famous in their lifetimes unless they used pen names. Emily Dickinson and quite a few others weren’t even well known until they were dead. Quite a few of them didn’t become famous until the 1900’s when their work was made popular by critics like Virginia Woolf.
Literacy rates for men and women were not particularly good, but for a good chunk of early British lit, women were largely confined to writing lousy romances lest they be seen as unfeminine. That women largely didn’t have financial autonomy was far more important than the literacy rates.
I mean, some of the authors in the list above:
“In May 1846 Charlotte, Emily and Anne self-financed the publication of a joint collection of poetry under their assumed names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. … Of the decision to use noms de plume, Charlotte wrote:
“Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.[5]”
“Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era….
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot’s life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. ”
“Austen’s works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.[4][C] Her plots, though fundamentally comic,[5] highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.[6] Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew’s A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.”Report
Nancy Drew vs the Hardy Boys.
Nancy Drew was the better series, simply because it was one of the few places that would hire women. The Hardy Boys was scut work.
This bespeaks an ideology that women ought to only be allowed to write for girls.Report
Yep. We have the full set of Harvard Great Books upstairs; 20+ volumes or whatever it is.
Not a women in the mob of great minds.
That’s a large part of why I felt Norton was a good alternative.
I notice that there was no objection to Lord of the Flies, though there’s not a girl in it. (Well, I objected, I have in the past here, too, so I didn’t feel it necessary to repeat myself and risk nagging.)Report
Heh. I should’ve played the game. Now, I’m stuck self-banishing from the Island Paradise because having to read or listen to item 4 sounds very unparadisaical. Maybe Russell could coach me up on the infinteness of jesting and I’d learn the error of my ways. I don’t see it, myself, but I’m open to the possibilities. I mean, the tome has been sitting on my bedside table right for over two years now, and I’ve not felt emanations of either I or J in all that time.
It’s not you IJ fans. It’s me.Report
There will be other needs for paper, rolling cigarettes for example.Report
Maybe Russell could coach me up on the infinteness of jesting
Well, I’m certainly willing to try.Report
The first thing I want to do is cast a production of the Tempest with the survivor’s.
Who wants to be Prospero?Report
Tempest is my favorite Shakespeare play.Report
Mine is The Winter’s Tale but The Tempest allows for a lot of really good site-specific work.Report
If we’re doing Tempest, I want to play Robbie the Robot.Report
And I want to play the villain, Taliban.Report
Psst…That’s Caliban
Also be careful on Friday….Report
Dibs on Ariel.Report
That is one hell of a reading list.
Once we make the switch over to Ordinary Times or whatever, we should publish something like this annually.Report
“(Though it should be noted that Follet’s two works were each nominated by the same person).”
Well, in my defense, you can’t really read the second with out reading the first (carts before horses principle) and, God knows, if you read the first, you’ll be damn glad there is a second with which to continue. Sue me.Report
And, I did also nominate The Joy of Sex. If there were a part II of that, I’d have nominated them both. Unfortunately, for us men, it’s usually just a one act Joy.Report
To my chagrin, I didn’t read the Bar Fight post closely enough to understand that what was going on was basically a ‘desert island books’ discussion, and even if I had I’m to sure I’d have known how to start arriving at just three books.
But given that the comments eventually arrived at the question, “What’s the other crucial “thing” to cover? Science, I think, but I’m not sure what book to recommend,” I thought I’d offer my response to it despite it being too late to be included. From a pure science perspective (meaning apart from Jason’s wise advice to include practical technical texts first), I’d nominate Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. He’s not a leading evolutionary biologist, not a biologist at all, but for conveying the foundational ideas about evolution that have shaped civilization since the discovery of evolution (the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis), I don’t know that a more elegant presentation of that set of ideas in the context of the history of related and competing ideas that it supplanted, has ever been presented. (And if there are candidates for that distinction that I don’t know of, I’d love to hear about them).
Of course, as a central science text, I can’t argue with the Principia, but in terms of actual use, I worry that it would sit on the shelf as we built out new civilization. Over time, as the foundational principles of Newtonian physics became hazier and hazier to us, we’d probably regret taking the Dennett, so I probably come down with those who voted for Newton. But I wanted Dennett’s essay to be mentioned.Report
While Heinlein’s book IS science fiction, the subject is 4th generation warefare/revolution to free the Moon from an oppressive Terran gov’t. and form a society with much less gov’t involvment in people’s lives.
It was in that context that I put it forth as a suggestion.Report
I completely blew it on forgetting Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Apologies all. Also, I’d wager there are an awful lot of impressive intellectuals here…and then there’s me and my books.Report
Sam, I’m feeling bad I didn’t mention the Phillip K. Dick/Roger Zelazney book, Deus Irae.
As I recall, it includes an awesome scene of giant cock roaches worshiping a VW Bug. And it’s an excellent look at primer on how a religion get’s a toe hold in a crisis.Report