[Deserted Isle Books is our latest series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]

My choice for a deserted isle book was immediate, and so were my doubts. I read poetry every day. The bookshelves in my bedroom (not to mention the bedside tables and several stacks on the floor) are all poetry. I feel like a traitor to the cause at the mere thought of choosing a novel over Rilke’s Duino Elegies or Alan Dugan’s Poems 7. But there was no other choice; it had to be Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years Of Solitude.

Perhaps this is because I’m taking the premise literally. I’m not choosing a favorite book. I’m choosing the one book I think might best stave off madness and despair if I had nothing else to read (and little else to do) for the rest of my life. I would need intrigue, tragedy, politics, humor, mystery, romance, and violence. I would need memorable scenes, great dialogue, and some way to hang elements of my lost life and lost world on this one book.

An excellent book of poems will give you all of those things. But only the epics such as the Odyssey or the Aeneid (come on, David Ferry, we’re waiting!) give you a long, complex story with many characters to keep you company. And it is precisely those two things: company and a story, that are necessary. Left with nothing but the four walls of my mind to scratch against in an exile of unknowable, perhaps interminable, duration, I would need a sense of time passing, the this, then that of plot to give structure to my life. …
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