Say you’re banned to a deserted island. Of course it’s going to be an island where it never rains and where it’s not too hot and you won’t get skin cancer. What books would you take along?

JUDITH: For me it would depend on the state of my memory. If my memory’s gone, I’ll go by my mother’s idea, which was, she said, “Old age is a wonderful thing. You just need two good books. By the time you finish the second one, you’ve forgotten the first and you can start again.”

LIZ: Oh, that is fabulous.

JUDITH: But if my memory is still there it would be Moby-Dick, because that’s like an encyclopedia. You can read about anything.

MARY: I’d take an encyclopedia.

JUDITH: Well, Moby-Dick is a little more readable, but it explains law, it explains music, it explains everything. And so that would be my choice.

MARY: I would take the biggest encyclopedia ever made … so big that I couldn’t live long enough to read it all.

LIZ: Well, I guess you all won’t care and you’ll think this is just an egotistical aside, but I once had a big romance with a guy who was Herman Melville’s grandson. It was extremely satisfactory. So here’s what I’d take: I’d take all ten volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization with The Lessons of History and then I’d take the Encyclopedia Britannica, because you’re going to be there a long time and you’ve a lot of reading to do.

JANE: Well, I’d take An Incomplete Education, which — I never went to college — teaches you the difference between The Iliad and The Odyssey, without having to read either one.

LIZ: Now wait a minute. One of them is about the Trojan War and the other’s about the founding of Rome.

JUDITH: Very good, Liz.

JANE: I sometimes think Liz has working knowledge of almost everything.

JUDITH: Jane, why would you want to avoid reading them? They’re good books.

JANE: I know. It’s just a way of learning about a lot of things you might have missed, and also you might just want to revisit a lot of things, like Einstein’s question, "What would a light beam look like if you could catch up to one?" Would you see a stationary wave frozen in time?

Also, I’d like some sci-fi books by William Gibson, his new one Spook Country or Neuromancer, or something by Ursula Le Guin, or Philip K. Dick, maybe Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Because reading about the dark dystopian worlds depicted in novels like these might make you feel fairly content, even lucky, being alone on a desert island. Also, something metaphysically or scientifically explorative like Feynman’s Lost Lecture or The Chemistry of Conscious States by J. Allan Hobson, or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Visions and Hyperspace by Michio Kaku would get your mind off of all of that sand. The Art of Looking Sideways is great! The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin and a great book of poetry, because you can read poetry over and over again and commit favorites to memory and recite them out loud to yourself. The sound of your own voice emitting deep poetic observations — what good company that could be! Oh, and I would want that beautiful, brilliant book of essays by Hilton Als, The Women. I would pack this first.

LIZ: I could just take The Western Canon by Harold Bloom, which I keep reading all the time and then I forget what I just learned about Montaigne or whoever … I have to go back.

JUDITH: You’ve given me a good idea, which is to take The Iliad and a Greek Lexicon, because you’d have all the time in the world and I’d finally learn Greek.

LIZ: You mean no one would take The Devil Wears Prada?