On one of the long car trips that were so big a part of our Christmas season, Kate and I passed the time by talking about books. Shocking, I know, but true. Kate brought up the idea of "Desert Island Books."

This is, of course, a concept with a number of problems (after all, if you're going to be stranded on a literal desert island, the key books to have are How to Survive on a Desert Island and How to Build a Boat with Things You Can Find on a Desert Island. Fiction is superfluous...). A better phrasing of the question is "pick ten books that you'd be willing to have as the only books you can read for the rest of your life." Of course, this is still a lousy way of getting at the real intent of the question, namely "list your ten very favorite books in all of the world." As part of the pleasure of reading fiction is the novelty of discovering new places and characters, it's not clear that a real "desert island" list should be the same as your list of favorite books. You'd probably want one or two "comfort reads," but you'd also want to take along a fairly wide range of stuff, including a few things you had never read before.

Anyway, as we kicked this around for a while, I realized that I've actually done this experiment, at least in a limited version. It wasn't a desert island, granted (Japan is fairly thickly settled), and it was only for a few months, but I have, in fact, packed books for a trip to an island where I wasn't certain to be able to find any other reading material.

Having an obsessive-compulsive streak, I actually kept a list of the books I read while I was there. It's not exactly a true "desert island" list, as I did buy a fair number of books there (especially once I was shown how to find Good Day Books), but I can more or less reconstruct what I bought for the trip. In the end, I didn't take any comfort reads, though I did take several books by reliable authors, but the range of stuff I did take is probably illustrative of something.

Here's the list, as best I can recall, in approximately the order in which I read them:

• Tomcat in Love by Tim O'Brien. A very strange book about a lecherous academic. Unsurprisingly, it collides with a Vietnam novel halfway through.
• 253 by Geoff Ryman. A collection of 253 character sketches, each containing 253 words, of the 253 passengers on a London subway that crashes. It makes more sense as a Web novel, and would've been a surreal reading experience even if I hadn't been reading it in the middle of a 12-hour flight to Tokyo.
• Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson. I had just discovered Bryson at that point, and this is one of his better books. In this one, he travels around England, seeing the sights, before moving back to America.

• The Best of H. P. Lovecraft by H. P. Lovecraft. I had never read Lovecraft before, and figured I ought to in order to understand:
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