I'll play too!

Here's my contribution to the "what would you save?" game going around the book blog world. The idea is to list the 10 books one would save in a fire, if one could only save 10, inspired by Anna Quindlen. I guess this makes more sense to me if I change it to the desert-island question -- because if I'm saving things from a fire, I would go for the things I couldn't replace, when I can buy new copies of most books. I suppose I could save the ones with lots of my writing in them or the ones that are signed. But when other people do the list, it seems to be books that they'd want to have with them when no others are available. So that's what I'm doing. For other lists, see Lotus Reads, Liquid Thoughts, and Anna Quindlen's original list, from A Work in Progress, with commentary by Danielle. Here's mine:

1. The Bible
2. The Bhagavad-Gita
3. The complete Shakespeare
4. The complete essays of Montaigne
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
7. Middlemarch by George Eliot
8. The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoyevsky
9. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
10. Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner

Okay, on a different day, I'd pick a completely different list. This is a very serious list of mostly pre-20th century stuff, except for the last two. But if I'm going with the desert-island scenario, I'd want things I know I could spend a lot of time with.

What's your list?