What book will you be?

I hang out at SFF.net quite a bit, and the other day Roby James posed an interesting question: If the world of the future suddenly became analogous to that of Ray Bradbury's classic Farenheit 451, what book would you choose to memorize in order to preserve it for future generations? For those of you who've never read the Bradbury novel, it's about a future society in which all books are burned in order to supress knowledge.

It's a difficult question. The easy responses are pithy--Farenheit 451 and Orwell's 1984 spring to mind. Then there's the obvious, factual ones, such as the entirety of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Others go for the Bible or the classics such as the works of Shakespeare or The Illiad, The Epic of Gilgamesh or perhaps Beowulf. From a practical, survivalist standpoint, the Official Boy Scout Handbook would be quite useful to have on instant recall.

Personally, I don't think I'd go for the obvious choices. After all, if they're so obvious, then quite a few other people would likely be hard at work, memorizing them. That's a built-in redundancy. I'd be more inclined to devote my feeble mental prowess to preserving books that are perhaps less "valuable" but no less important. Something like Nevil Schute's On the Beach, as powerful and disturbing cautionary tale about nuclear war as anything I've ever read. That kind of elegant hopelessness is something that needs to be passed along and preserved. Likewise, I'd be inclined to preserve Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a landmark book--not only in genre, but in contemporary literature as well--that utterly floored me when I first read it. Ironically, I didn't want to read it at first. I'd ordered it by mistake from the Science Fiction Book Club, and was mighty pissed at the fact when I figured out what had happened. Oh, for happy accidents.

Clearly my tastes run towards the speculative end of the spectrum--no way I'd waste precious brain cells on something like Steinbeck--but what of everyone else? Given the urgency, given the need, what book would you become?

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