4 books

I read an interesting hypothetical online today: "If you could prevent four books (or series) from being destroyed forever, which would you choose?"

There are two answers to this, I guess. One would be if I had to choose four books just for myself. That was the slightly easier question. I would choose:
Asimov's Foundation series
The Three Musketeers Saga
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
The Feynman Lectures on Physics

These are books I could not live without.

But, if I had to choose for all of humanity? That becomes a more difficult problem. Should I choose Great Works of Literature? By whose metric? What should I choose from Shakespeare, or Homer, or Dante; Goethe or Moliere? What about non-Western literature, about which I know far less than I should? What about science texts? Could humanity afford to lose Newton's Principia Mathematica? Or Darwin's On the Origin of the Species? Do I need to choose the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah, or some other religious or holy book?

Faced with these dilemmas, I think I'd have to choose books that challenged me personally, or forced me to think, or contained ideas I think others should consider. To Kill a Mockingbird makes the list, hands-down. So does Inherit the Wind. I would probably add 1984. And Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, by Tom Mula.

Look for upcoming posts on what those books mean to me.