The scenario: It’s the end of days and you will survive by hiding out in a secure bunker alone. When the world wakes up once more, you will need to re-enter  literature into a brand-new culture. But space is scarce, and you must choose wisely: which SIX  books would you choose to span a single human life?  

This is a terrifying prospect! We are creatures that thrive on companionship. Even if someone lives alone, are they ever really single? They have memories. Beloved voices murmur in their head. They wear clothes made by other hands. One of the first things I would want to do is make sure that at least some of the books show groups of friends, rather than starring lonely heroes.

Maybe I’m taking this too literally, after experiencing lockdowns in three different places; two where I could see trees, one where I could walk in snow. I’m wondering now what’ll happen to my own ways of reading, if I’m reading alone; without being able to share a few lines on social media, or send a postcard with an inspirational quotation on it to a friend…

Shall I start reading aloud to myself more, maybe return to nursery rhymes? Be the other people I can’t read with in the world? Shall I get new hobbies? Longing for little plants, I might read gardening books with colourful pictures. Wanting to go dancing, I might look wistfully at a yoga guide with bendy people instructing me, bit by bit, how to breathe deeply and make happy shapes.

I like hearing all sorts of languages and dialects. I can’t tie my shoelaces well, or cut things out neatly, but I can learn languages. What if I end up picking books in six languages I don’t know yet, with so much time to learn? Maybe I’d hope that somewhere, somehow, speakers of those languages would be waking up, too, and we’d meet, as I ventured out of the bunker…

I’m so tempted to be over-responsible. Maybe other people, in unknown places around the world, are waking up with their own books? Maybe I don’t have to represent every language and every area of knowledge. Somewhere there might be an astronomer saving the knowledge of how to look at the stars; a medical scientist, who’ll put us on a path to health; an environmental worker with a deep understanding of how build a new, harmonious way of living with our world. If so much has been destroyed, perhaps we can start afresh. How sad, but how exciting!

Isn’t it wonderful, too, how many kinds of physical books exist, and have existed, for us to enjoy? Two centuries ago, in Yorkshire, a fourteen-year-old Charlotte Brontë hand-made six tiny books with her brother, The Young Men’s Magazine (1830). Even longer ago, in the European Middle Ages, there were miniature ‘Books of Hours’, some velvety, or nested in boxes, with beautiful illustrations, and just the size to fit in your hand. I remember growing up a little scared by the enormous Sanskrit holy books wrapped in silk on rosewood lecterns in my grandfather’s library. They were too heavy for me to lift, and I was not supposed to touch them. I liked playing near these enormous books, the way you might like playing near a mountain.

The book is a perfect technology. I shall be able to wake up in my bunker and gently pat my books before taking them out into our world.

I can only carry forward what I know. I would want to save some traces of the literary history we’ve already had. Like seeing footsteps partly washed away on a beach, we’d be able to marvel; we’d be able to join in tracing something of literature’s journeys. But with only six books, am I the person who could decide fairly between Sumerian epic and classical Japanese novel, theatre by Wole Soyinka or William Shakespeare, American erasure poems or innovative French poetry?

Maybe I should imagine that the disaster which put me in the bunker was sudden. Maybe I should play a game or use a performance technique to feel that sense of suddenness. Maybe I should make a heap of the books I actually own right now, my favourite ones, spin around with closed eyes, and pick six at random. I wish I could give you books in Braille, and books with fold-out designs, and flipbooks, and books with interlinear translation, and books with fuzzy bits. I wish. I wish I could give you all the books that made me and the people who are dear to me.

That’s the answer. I’ll pick six books, not as if I’m a grand representative of the Best and Only literature. I’ll just pick six books that I’ll be able to speak about lovingly; books that lit my way. The other people waking up and venturing out of their bunkers will have things of their own to share.

In your view, what book does everyone need to read in childhood? Why?

This made me think of a lot of things!  I would say, an illustrated dictionary. The one I liked best was a French dictionary, Mon Larousse en Images. Every word was in a square with lovely or interesting pictures. I learned from this that words belong to a world and open up worlds. Becoming friends with dictionaries from early on is a way to gain freedom, as a reader. I could look things up and try to figure them out with my friend-dictionary, not always having to ask grown-ups. A close second would be the Winnie the Pooh stories, because they show so many different personalities in the group of animal friends, and a real sense of comfort with wondering and wandering. But I’m only allowed one…!

What should be read in adolescence?

Ah, this was another close-run contest! I want something showing how we aren’t trapped in our own minds and how our feelings are powerful, but don’t have to overpower us. I want something with drive and energy, with the feeling of a quest, but also with moments of doubt and passages of serenity. I want something that’ll form people into imaginative writers, if that’s what they want to become… I was wondering about Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, but they are a whole series, and I couldn’t pick just one. I was wondering too about St Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, which contain a surprising number of jokes and details of daily life, from stealing fruit to being distracted by watching lizards, as well as glimpses of eternity and the struggle to become his true self. Moreover, he lived in a very interesting time and place; but I’m no expert, I do not trust myself to introduce his story to other people. As a late adolescent, the early to mid-twentieth century English writer Virginia Woolf was incredibly important to me. The selection of journal entries in Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, is amazingly vivid. You can see how she reads; how books come to life for her, and also how she learns to write from reading, so the life she is living turns immediately into beautiful and evocative words. While a diary doesn’t have a plot, because our lives don’t work that way, I felt that Virginia Woolf’s diaries were thrilling; I never knew what would happen next…war, love, a terrible mood, a good meal…

What required reading should adulthood have?

Adulthood is strange. It seems to be that time when other people expect you to be able to do things, and you find yourself doing those things, not because you can, but because someone needs to, and you’ve become that person… Displacement is such a feature of our world that I’d like to recommend a book firmly rooted in place yet layered with the dreams of many places. I’m thinking of the observational eye of a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins or Lynette Roberts; of memoirs by Mahmoud Darwish or Natalia Ginzburg; of the journeys in Kei Miller’s A Light Song of Light and the meditations in Lorna Goodison’s Oracabessa. In the end, I think it would be Martin Carter, University of Hunger. This collection of poems and selected prose by a Guyanese writer who was revolutionary and politician, protester and wistful lover, legend, and family man, is a portrait of time and place, but also gives us a wealth of ways of approaching the world, from chant to lyric to prose reflection.

Which text would you choose for everyone in middle age?

Undoubtedly Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. Dante begins in the middle of life, lost in a dark wood, and literally takes us through hell and back, into a heaven that’s more exciting than any rollercoaster and more blissful than any sunny beach. He is the finest poet I know whether at the level of describing a leaf or imagining the whole cosmos. He also is quite critical of the way things were run in his time, which will be a great guide as to what not to do as we set up a new world!

The best book to aid us as we tackle aging?

Antoine de St-Exupéry, The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), a sweet, gentle, and uncompromising tale of friendship and loss. I’m tempted to recommend Winnie the Pooh, for something lighter and less melancholy, though I’ll stick with St-Exupéry. It’s a book you could have read at any age, and you’ll be able to share it with younger and older friends. Companionship is ever more important as we get older.

Lastly, which book will sweeten the end of life for us all?

The Bible! I don’t mean to push religion here, in any way; but this book is a compendium of life. And it insists that love is stronger than death, in so many words, in so many ways. There’s something for every mood, whether you are wailing or raging like a Psalmist or simply sharing a meal with your friends. It’s also important that we don’t know who all the authors were, and that women and the marginalized are key figures in the text. Anonymity, plurivocality, and re-centring who or what truly matters: here is the essence of how literary tradition forms, along with human self-understanding.

Finally, looking at the body of literature you are creating for this brave new world, what do you think they all have in common? What does that say about the world you want to build? The world you think  needs  to be built? 

What these books all have in common is that ultimately, they are attentive to the world, and they are hopeful. From the first, the children’s illustrated dictionary hopes that you’ll want to name things, perhaps tenderly, not possessively. I’ve also chosen books that it would be easy to share with other readers alongside you; they do not drug your imagination into solitary adventures. There are obvious gaps in the reading that formed me. It’s skewed towards English and the arts. I have tended to ‘identify’ more with ‘male’-authored books, and that’s reflected here; perhaps I should have gone for Ursula Le Guin, who gently helps us undo that kind of slant. The world that needs to be built is one that isn’t afraid to hear itself through a plurality of voices. The dead and the living of all the history known to him speak together in Dante’s Commedia. Martin Carter, the Guyanese poet, bends down to listen to the tongueless whispering of the land. The narrator in Le Petit Prince learns to hear bells and tears in the stars that help him hold his memories. The angels in the Bible keep coming to say: do not fear.