Great Books Week!

I was posting more chick twit today (in case you haven't seen, we're tweeting the first chapter of The Pecking Order, check it out), and came across Grammar Girl's tweet about Great Books Week. In honor of Great Books Week, the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors is "hosting a Blog Tour with a specific daily topic Monday through Friday." Though it may cut into our fug girls time, it sounds fun and we decided to participate. Here's the first topic:

If I were stranded alone on a deserted island with only seven books to read over the next few years, I would like to have…
1. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. If I were stranded alone on an island, I’d probably be neck deep in self-pity (and sand), and Gilbert’s book would, as always (the two to three times I read it each year), remind me that I can choose how I wish to feel in this vast universe.
2. The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy. Language. Beautiful, lyrical, gut-wrenching language. Plus, he so effectively conveys the splendor of the ocean and the tides, with which I’m destined over the next few years, apparently, to become intimately familiar.
3. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. I had to make a chart the first time I read this book, and even then I’m not sure I fully grasped the time travel component. Time travel hurts my head. It’s why watching Lost sometimes puts me in a state of panic. But if I have a few years to figure it out, I’d love to dive back in.
4. Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews. Because I have to have a guilty pleasure now and then, and there won’t be any US Weekly or OK magazine stands on the island. And I doubt the coconuts make good gossip fodder.
5. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. Solitude doesn't exactly do wonders for one's sense of humor and laughter is the best medicine and all that, so I can't imagine a deserted island without at least one of Sedaris's collection of guffaw-inducing essays.
6. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. This book is a reminder that books are fun, stories are fun, language is fun, perhaps moving me to pen a humorous, fictionalized account of my ordeal on banana leaves or the bark of palm trees.
7. The Collected Works of Shakespeare. Lust, murder, disguise, and iambic pentameter. Does it get any better? Plus, it could make an effective tent.