Robyn Archer – Singer, Melbourne International Festival Director

“I am honored to have been asked to select some books for the new Melbourne City Library. I was excited by the offer and have found the task predictably inspiring as well as challenging since I worked my first few drafts in Zurich where there is only one, but good, English bookshop to jog my memory.  Not that this task would have been any easier in Australia where my most treasured books are in four places – a friend’s house in Sydney, my storage unit in Sydney, my rented accommodation at Henley Beach in Adelaide and my rented accommodation in Port Melbourne.

I selected according to a few dynamic principles:

• The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is the one book I would choose to have if that is all I could have. In the poems of Bertolt Brecht, I find a lifetime that still speaks with relevance today – a kind of way to think for one’s life: from the sensuous passions of youth to the political and intellectual awakening, the development of a craft, the way one reacts to profound crisis that threatens to kill you off, the decision never to read anything in life as black versus white, a sense of wonder, satire, documentation of one’s own times, and finally a return to the simple pleasures again. But, as Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience show, the return to simplicity is now an informed one; this is also the message of Richard Rolle, the 14th Century English mystic who spoke of a passage through the dark cloud of unknowing – the further you go, the darker and more confusing it gets, but you have no choice to go on that journey and only by going on that mysterious journey will you even have a chance to break through that cloud to the shining godhead above. Of course I don’t speak of a particular deity in my instance. 

• This philosophical beginning needed to be tempered first by general background – hence the histories.

• But first of all, in case anyone wouldn’t take my word for it, one must be encouraged by Calvino’s Why Read Classics. This book also contains one of the other selecting principles – books that will so convince you that you will be led to many other things through them. The literal references, the commentary on the times, their bibliographies etc, open up the world of books at least a hundredfold from these mere fifty.

• Incidentally, Gibbon, Roberts, Hobsbawm and Gombrich are also classic texts on how to write elegant clear prose. Everything you want to absorb about writing in English can be found in here. They are a lifetime’s study in language.

• But my roots are European, and so I needed some central pieces which would counteract my naturally anglophile nature. I started with the Middle East because therein lies the major question of our times. I also took care to have an American, Japanese, Indian and Australian voice to keep a reader aware. And in this to provoke questions about absence – where is the African story, or the Chinese.”

History and its Importance
Tariq Ali  The Clash of Fundamentalisms
David Barsamian  Culture & Resistance: Conversations with Edward Said
Bertolt Brecht, John Willett (ed)  Poems 1913-1956
Italo Calvino  Six Memos for the Millennium
Italo Calvino  Why Read the Classics?
Noam Chomsky  Understanding Power (the Indispensable Chomsky)
Edward Gibbon  Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire
Eric Hobsbawm  The Age of Capital
Eric Hobsbawm  The Age of Empire
Eric Hobsbawm  The Age of Revolution
Karl Kraus (trans Alexander Gode & Sue E Wright)  The Last Days of Mankind: a Tragedy in Five Acts
Bernard Lewis  The Middle East
JM Roberts  The Penguin History of Europe
Edward Said  Orientalism
John Willett (ed)  The New Sobriety

Art and Architecture
EH Gombrich  The Essential Gombrich: Selected Writings on Art & Culture
Wassily Kandinsky  The Spiritual in Art
Rem Koolhaus & Bruce Marr  S,M,L,XL
Indra Kagis McEwen  Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture
Miyeko Murase  The Written Image: Japanese Calligraphy & Painting
Paul Oliver  Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide
Maria Antonella Peliccan  Traces of India: Photography, Architecture & the Politics of
  Representation 1850-1900
David Summers  Real Spaces: World Art History & the Rise of Western Modernism         
 
Philosophy and Learning
William Blake  The Songs of Innocence & Experience (illustrated)
Boethius  The Consolations of Philosophy
Alain de Botton  The Consolations of Philosophy
Donald Keene  A History of Japanese Literature – 4 volumes
Penguin Ancient Classics  The English Mystics
Jean Piaget  The Child’s Conception of the World
Jean Piaget  The Origins of Intelligence in Children
Richard Rolle  The Cloud of Unknowing
St Augustine  The Confessions

Life
Elizabeth David  South Wind Through the Kitchen: the Best of Elizabeth David
Derek Jarman and Howard Sooley  Derek Jarman’s Garden
Kristen Linklater   Freeing the Natural Voice

Poetry & Prose – offering alternate visions of the above world
Harold Bloom  The Western Canon
Don Delillo  Underworld
Federico Garcia Lorca  The Collected Poems
Gabriel Garcia Marquez  Love in the Time of Cholera
Allen Ginsberg  City Mid-night Junk Strain: Selected Poems 1847-1995
Kate Jennings  Moral Hazard
Michael Ondaatje  The English Patient
Murakami  Dance Dance Dance
Murakami  Wild Sheep Chase
Marcel Proust  Remembrance of Times Past
Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children
Patrick White  The Aunt’s Story