Nerd Alert

If you were going to join a space colony and you could only bring one book with you from Earth, what would it be?

This is a question that has intrigued me since I was ten and read The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh, about a group of colonists from Earth who set up shop on a new planet. Each person in the colony is allowed to bring one book. Because they're not organized and don't compare selections before hopping on the spaceship, they end up taking multiple copies of Robinson Crusoe and some of the kids take comic books which quickly fall apart. One girl takes a little green book and won't show anyone what it is. At the very end, you find out that it's a blank book and she's been writing in it, chronicling the story of their colony, and everyone agrees that this is the most valuable book any of them brought. Nice hook, but you can always make paper and write on it, so I didn't think her choice was that great.

Anyway, at the time I read the book, I picked out The Chestry Oak by Kate Seredy as my choice. It's about a six-year-old boy in Hungary whose life gets torn apart by WWII. He ends up a refugee orphan in America and finds solace when he's adopted by a nice Midwestern family. It's so beautifully told, and parts of it (like when he gets reunited with his horse) still made me cry when I reread it last summer.

Later, I revised my selection to Possession, by A.S. Byatt, which is a really intricate, elegant exploration of Victorian literature and scholarship. It weaves together so many literary themes, myths, and poems that I figured it would give me lots of food for thought in the long evenings. Plus, it's a love story.

But now I have a new choice. It's the dictionary. I know, you are amazed at my choice. "Wow!" you're thinking. "What a laaame choice!" But really. What you truly want if you're leaving everything you know is a kind of all-encompassing work that captures everything you want to remember about life on Earth. With a dictionary, you can start out looking up piroplasm, and get sidetracked into explorations of persimmons, pugnacious, and photofluorography. Along the way you can laugh at perspicacious and prestidigitation. You could have endless hours of fun staging spelling bees and knowledge-a-thons while the weird alien wolves howl outside your village. The dictionary won't provide any comfort if you want stories, but it captures all the ingredients you need to remind yourself of the stories you already know.