On Demand
Survival Kit
Sunday, July 25, 2004
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A.S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt has said that her books “try to be about the life of the mind, as well as of society and the relations between people.” Critics have called her a “dazzling storyteller”, a “celebrated polymath”, and the “patron saint of bookworms.” In works like the best-selling Possession (which won the 1990 Booker Prize and was adapted into a popular film), The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Angels and Insects (which was also made into a film), and A Whistling Woman, she weaves science, history, philosophy and other scholarly pursuits into stories both timeless and modern. Let’s find out what this intellectually curious writer would consider the essential components of her survival kit.
Her list:
1) Equipment and materials to learn to paint
2) Complete works of Terry Pratchett
3) Solti’s recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Four Operas
4) Complete poems of Wallace Stevens
5) The wherewithal to learn Russian, and, if she can have it, one Dostoyevsky novel – The Idiot
6) Book on the metaphysical poets
7) Lots of wool to knit with; also the Kaffe Fassett book on knitting
8) Large book on neuroscience (not a book that currently exists; a book that has everything she wants in it.)
1) Equipment and materials to learn to paint
2) Complete works of Terry Pratchett
3) Solti’s recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Four Operas
4) Complete poems of Wallace Stevens
5) The wherewithal to learn Russian, and, if she can have it, one Dostoyevsky novel – The Idiot
6) Book on the metaphysical poets
7) Lots of wool to knit with; also the Kaffe Fassett book on knitting
8) Large book on neuroscience (not a book that currently exists; a book that has everything she wants in it.)
