Inspired by a survey question at the writers' festival, have been collecting the desert island books (3, at least in theory) nominations of various of my more readerly acquaintances.
(Mine, at least just now, would be To The Lighthouse, Invisible Cities, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World.)
As to those of others so far (with more possibly to follow):
• Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, and Blake's collected works
• The Bible, Yeats' collected works, and "some kind of coffee table book with pictures of places around the world"
• Moby Dick, Catch-22, and Pride and Prejudice
• The Great Gatsby, Oscar and Lucinda, and Possession or The Blind Assassin (and an attempt to add Brideshead Revisited "because, to be fair, Great Gatsby is hardly a book, more like a brochure")
• The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited, and Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier)
• Something by Yukio Mishima and something by early Plath
• Nabokov's collected stories or Lolita, What I Loved, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• War and Peace, Kafka on the Shore, and a complete set of Beatrix Potter
• Lolita, a book of love poems by Pablo Neruda, and The Master and Margarita
