Desert Island Discs is a radio programme where celebrities from all walks of life are interviewed as they choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island; as well as the Bible and the Complete Work of Shakespeare… with those two books I wonder what else you might need to read? I’m not a Christian but there is more than enough in the King james Bible to keep me interested for many years cast away, but the inclusion of Shakespeare would be a joy.
I think I would choose a sonnet a day to read, study, enjoy and maybe even learn; with 154 of them it would take me quite a few months to get through them all… so if I did look at a sonnet a day… and maybe without even being on a desert island I might do that, I would start at number 1:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
Lois Elsden 