I recently started listening to BBC’s Desert Island Discs podcasts.  I stumbled upon them looking for new classicist topics.  I ran across one with the amazing Mary Beard, and then started looking at others. It’s a really interesting show and made me think about what my choices would be.

The premise is that you will be stranded on a desert island and you can take 8 recordings with you, one book, and one luxury item. You will also be provided with the complete works of Shakespeare and a religious or philosophical text.  At the end of the program, the interviewer often asks which of the 8 recordings is the most important one to you, in case you can only take one disc with you.

My musical choices:

  1. Mozart's Requiem (Nikolaus Harnoncourt & Concentus Musicus Wein)
  2. Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony (Vasily Petrenko & Royal Liverpool Philharmonic)
  3. Schubert's Death and the Maiden (Takács Quartet)
  4. John Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard
  5. The Doors by The Doors (1st album)
  6. Pat Benatar's In the Heat of the Night
  7. Dire Straits's Brothers in Arms
  8. AC/DC's Powerage
The music disc I would chose if I could only take one would be Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard. It has the full range of emotions: love, despair, joy, anger, confusion, enlightenment and a form of spirituality.

My religious/philosophical text would be Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), translated by A. E. Stallings.

My book choice is Homer’s Iliad, the two-volume Loeb edition with facing pages of ancient Greek and contemporary English.  I relish this work and originally was going to go with Caroline Alexander’s translation of the Iliad (my favorite), but decided with my free time on the island, I could finally finish learning Greek and read it fully in the original!

My luxury item was a tough call. Many pick beds, or treats, or something along those lines. I simply want a new deck of playing cards in a protective case. With cards, I can play a multitude of solitary games or even concoct multi-player scenarios to occupy my mind and time.