Another interesting list from A Passion for Books--this one from Anna Quindlen (whose essays I greatly enjoy):
The Ten Books One Would Save in a Fire (If One Could Only Save Ten):
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
- The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
I would want to save all of them, of course. If I was limited, I would definitely grab the Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and George Eliot. Some of the others I haven't read (but am working on it...), so I might just have to add Howard's End by E.M. Forster, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. And do I have to limit it to classics? I might also grab Chocolat by Joanne Harris and my books by Clare Chambers. Of course it might just depend on the mood I was in, too. Or by the time I decided which ten to grab the house might already have burned down. Which would you grab?