Top 10 Books You’d Want for a Desert Island (or Moving Abroad)?

Ten books? Are they kidding? I'd need at least this many!

​If you were marooned on a desert island, what ten books would you bring along? Besides, obviously, Raft-Building for Dummies, Six Easy Ways to Catch Fish with Your Bare Hands, and How to Send Up a Humongous Smoke Signal Without Setting Fire to the Trees.
 
A surprising number of people — asked this question online — choose Stephen King novels such as The Stand, It, and The Shining. For a start, each of these books is enormous enough to occupy countless hours. “Plus,” as one Reddit reader notes, “you could kill food with it.” A Quora reader picked the Oxford English Dictionary, and while I generally prefer my books with a more compelling plotline, an unabridged dictionary does have its advantages for clobbering prey. 

A fearsome hunting tool indeed!

This morning I pulled out my favorite dictionary, the battered Español-Inglés Diccionario, faithful companion of many hours of mind-bending labor during my early days in Seville. It wouldn’t be much use in hunting animals for food, but it did help me slay a lot of dragons, such as the two different verbs “to be” (ser and estar) and the slippery subjunctive used to express hypotheticals (“If you were marooned on a desert island…”).

​My dictionary lives on a shelf alongside Spanish translations of many old favorites, the ones I ran across in Seville bookstores and rejoiced to own again, albeit in slightly different form.

 
​Mine is what Susan Sontag calls “a book-drenched life.” It’s a rare and satisfying pleasure to find others who are equally as smitten with the written word, which is what drew me to Seville’s new English-language book club this winter.
 
The Any Book Book Club was launched a year ago by newly arrived author Angela Atkins. Born in the UK, she came of age in New Zealand, where she married and built a company with her husband. Since then they’ve lived in the UK, New Zealand, California, France, Valencia, and Madrid; currently they’re dividing their time between France and Seville. She’s published several bestselling books, holds writing workshops, and runs the book club, many of whose members are writers and editors.

The Any Book Book Club last Saturday

​I was curious about Angela’s intensely literary life and invited her out to lunch after book club last Saturday. We ate gorgeous Peruvian arroz chaufa (fried rice) and causa a la limeña (Lima-style potatoes) at one of El Cevichano’s sidewalk tables. (Yes, it’s warm enough to eat outside in Seville right now. Please don’t hate us.)
 
I asked her about the book club’s unusual format: we pick a theme (mysteries, for instance, or Asian authors) and everyone brings a favorite work in that genre.
 
“I love this format,” I told her. “Having slogged through countless book club selections that didn’t work for me at all, it’s a pleasure to talk about a book I truly love. And you go around the circle, so everyone has a chance to speak about the one they brought. Did you dream this up yourself?”
 
“Actually….. I went to a similar one in Valencia and loved the format too.”
 
That made me think of the Oscar Wilde quote, “Talent borrows, genius steals!” — which is also attributed to T. S. Elliot, Pablo Picasso, and others, thus neatly proving its own point.

Bestselling author Angela Atkins at El Cevichano on Saturday

​“What advice do you give to budding writers?” I asked.
 
“Read, read, read, read, read, read,” she said. “And then write: journal, write short stories, experiment. Be part of a writers group, or meet somebody who you can get some guidance from.”
 
It’s tempting to rush headlong from manuscript to submission or self-publication, but Angela advises patience. As a reminder, she keeps the 1000-page handwritten manuscript of her first novel, composed at age 14, at back of her closet, where she feels it belongs.
 
“The first thing you write is not going to be publishable,” she says. “If you want it to be good, you need to write, and you need to edit, and you need to get feedback. Every successful novelist has written one or two or three novels before the first novel was published — just for fun, just to practice writing.” 
 
Not everyone bothers to edit or proofread. In these self-publishing times, it's not uncommon to stumble across works riddled with typos and errors. I find myself muttering furiously and reaching for an editor’s blue pencil, which is, of course, useless on a Kindle. As Stephen King wisely says, “To write is human, to edit is divine.”

“When the books are finally ready to make their way in the world,” I said, “what do you tell fledgling writers about marketing them?” I’m now in the marketing stage with my new book, and it’s always a struggle.
 
“The younger generations are much more comfortable with social media and promoting themselves,” Angela said. “They've been doing it all their life. Gen X and boomers are perhaps less comfortable with it.”
 
This is certainly true for me. I often have the disconcerting feeling that my mother is watching from beyond the grave, giving me her trademark disapproving look to suggest I’m putting myself forward in an unbecoming manner. Sorry, Mom. It’s all part of an author’s life these days.

​To launch my new book, I’ve been busy for many weeks drafting media releases, updating mailing lists, designing the cover, tweaking the text, and sorting out formatting. Meanwhile Rich plunged into the Byzantine complexity of Amazon’s marketing algorithms, which have to be propitiated like ancient gods, with strict adherence to esoteric commandments.
 
To our astonishment, before the book was even officially published, your pre-orders made it shoot up to #1 in multiple travel categories. It was an instant bestseller before it was even live — yay! A thousand thanks, everyone!
 
My San Francisco: 20 Extraordinary Walks in America’s Quirkiest City went live on Amazon today. If you are thinking of buying a copy, be sure to do it this week, while the launch price is 99 cents; as of Monday, February 24, the book will cost $5.99.
 
At the moment, My San Francisco is only available on Amazon Kindle, which publishes the majority (72%) of e-books and offers the most efficient way to release a new work. I realize not everyone has a Kindle, so if you’d like to see the book in a different format, such as a paperback or another kind of e-book, please let me know. If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll certainly look into other options.

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My first travel memoir

​A big part of the fun of publishing is getting feedback from the reader universe. I'd love to have you share your thoughts in a customer review on Amazon after you read My San Francisco. My first travel book, Dancing in the Fountain, now has more than 500 reviews. Most are extremely kind, although years ago one reader wrote grumpily, “The author talks about herself way too much.” Hey, it’s a memoir. Isn’t that the idea?
 
In the end, as Angela points out, writing is about having fun. We don’t do it for reviews or sales or ranking but because it is who we are. “I write for the same reason I breathe,” said Isaac Asimov. “Because if I didn’t, I would die.” So I’ve finally decided what survival books I’m bringing to that desert island: ten blank notebooks and dozens and dozens of pens.

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On a desert island, books come in handy for all sorts of activities.

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THE AMIGOS PROJECT
This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how to enrich our lives while living or traveling abroad, finding new ways of avoiding the isolation that's become a global epidemic.
See all my Amigos Project posts here.

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FOR FURTHER READING
My upcoming book on San Francisco
My bestselling travel memoirs & guides
Cozy Places to Eat in Seville

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