Top Ten Tuesday: Along with the photo albums....

from sodahead.com

The Broke and the Bookish are hosting Top Ten Tuesday today, as they do every Tuesday. This week's topic is: Top Ten Books you would save if your house were abducted by aliens or another natural disaster.

Here's mine in no particular order:

10. Don DeLillo, White Noise: Not only is this my favorite book of all time, but it is also the book I've read the most times, so it is filled with marginalia. I bought a new copy one semester that I was teaching it because I had changed editions, but I still had to use the old one.

9. Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf:  This one has an inscription from my husband in it from when we were dating.  I embarrassingly still haven't read the book, but the copy is meaningful to me.

8. My Bible:  It was my mom's when she was a kid and it is leather bound and beautiful.

7.My Penguin Classics Works of Charles Dickens:  They are beautiful book objects, and I wouldn't mind rereading some of them either.

6. I have a children's book that my parents had made for me when I was a kid.  The main character is me and it is a scratch and sniff book.  It isn't too smelly anymore, but I would still want to save it from the aliens.

5.David Sedaris, Naked:  I'm not super attached to this book, but it is one of the first signed copies of a book from an author that I just thought was super awesome.  A friend working in a bookstore had it signed for me.

4. Michael Moore, Dude Where's My Country:  Again, not because of the content of the book, but because I have memories attached to seeing him read and then having my copy signed with my dad.

3. My Norton and Heath Anthologies of British and American Lit:  These are my beat up college copies with tons of tape flags and notes.  When I became a teacher and realized that I could get these for free, I was a little flabbergasted.  I wouldn't want to replace the old ones though.

2. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot:  I have a signed first edition, and it is the one that I think will grow most in value of the collection that I've saved.  And I haven't read it and really want to, so I would take it for that reason as well.

1. Kafka, The Metamorphosis:  I have a copy of this that I bought in Prague and that I feel a little sentimentally attached to.