Packing for the desert island

There's a Christian meme that's making the rounds of the Internet:

One cuisine:   

One author: 

One genre of music: 

One TV show: 

One place: 

One season:

One city: 

One game:

One book of the Bible: 

One movie: 

...how about you?

A few observations:

1. This is an expansive variation on the desert island trope: if you only have one book with you on a desert island, which would you pick? 

2. Up to a point this is a useful spiritual exercise to prioritize. Asking what's your favorite, what's the best, what's the greatest, can be intellectual pruning so that we don't fritter away the gift of life on what's frivolous, ephemeral, unimportant, and second-rate. 

3. That said, there's no one best example of everything or even most things. And for that we should be grateful since life would become very boring very fast if there was one best example of everything. We need variety. 

Something can be the best in one respect, but not in another. Creatures have limitations. Not every excellence is compossible in the same thing. There are tradeoffs. 

4. To take another comparison: as I've often remarked, a flawed masterpiece is far more satisfying than a flawless artwork. For instance, Casino Royale is a flawless movie, but there's nothing that makes me care. By contrast, Hitchcock makes movies that are very uneven, yet they have a few unforgettable scenes. 

5. Regarding one book of the Bible, a problem with that hypothetical is whether we've read the entire Bible, whether we're already familiar with the Bible in general, and with that overall background in mind, we pick one book of the Bible. But what if we never read the Bible. In that event, which one book should we read? 

Likewise, as our memory of the Bible in general fades on the desert island, does that make the one book we took more valuable or less valuable? There's a sense in which books of the Bible are like chapters of one book. Even if you had a favorite chapter, it's not a stand-alone chapter. Its meaning depends in part on preceding or succeeding chapters.  

6. When Christians are asked, if you could only take one book with you to the desert island, the conventional answer is "The Bible". In one respect, that's a pious answer, the answer you're supposed to give. But here's another way to put it: if you couldn't take the Bible, what book or author would you take?

If I couldn't take the Bible, I wouldn't take anything to else to read. No matter how fine a Christian poet, theologian, or fiction writer, I wouldn't want to have one man's outlook that embedded in my own mind. Where there'd be no point of contrast, no other writers to counterbalance that singular outlook. I wouldn't want my mind dominated by the outlook of just one other person, however gifted and orthodox. That would be a kind of possession.