Borges' Desert Island Reads

The Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has been, and continues to, acquire tons of writers' papers. The latest that I've heard about are some papers of Borges' one of which reveals the author's thoughts on the "desert island reading" game:

In the short essay “La biblioteca de Robinsón” (“Robinson’s Library”), an unpublished manuscript recently acquired by the Ransom Center, readers can now discover Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s take on this issue.

Over at The Ransom Center's site, there's an interesting article about just what kind of books Borges would take with him. He's fairly clear about what he would not take:

Dismissing famous novels and books of verse for their dangerous nostalgic value, the author bans texts that discuss human relationships altogether and suggests instead those that deal with “the relationship man-God, man-numbers, man-Universe.”

And he's just about as clear on what he would.

His list results in a lucid, yet unexpected trio: a metaphysical book (his examples are spearheaded by Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, which is influenced by Eastern mysticism), a book “on history that is sufficiently remote” (Plutarch, Gibbon, and Tacitus battle it out for this title), and a good algebra text, with many exercises—the latter a revelation that can be traced to his fascination for the elegance present in mathematics, and that has been recently explored by scholars.

With an author like Borges, that is, an author who excelled in thinking over strange questions and who delighted in projecting philosophical battles into stories, even a literary game like this can't be dismissed. I'm eager to read the whole paper for myself.

For more on recent Borges writings, see our coverage of the ALTA panel on the recent Borges books from Penguin.