Would you want to read about girls stuck on a desert island if you, too, were stuck on a desert island?

Last week, the Motherlode blog at the Times asked “What’s your desert island picture book?” And I figured, why limit it to picture books? If I’m stuck on a desert island, I’m going to need a book with serious heft to get me through the long, glorious days of sunshine and exotic fruits. (And, um, danger.)

The problem is, I didn’t have any fresh ideas for what my own desert island book would be. So I asked around!

• Alex chose The Giving Tree (because maybe, just maybe, she could study the illustrations enough to learn how to build a boat from a tree…for escape purposes!).
• Tyler, thinking of unending stretches of time, says he’d pick “a really really long book” — like a Hemingway or Dickens anthology.
• Similarly, Dante would choose a book of Shakespeare’s complete works. “Not only is it a lot of content, but the plays are so diverse that it would never really get boring,” he explains. “And they allow your imagination to go nuts — important when you’re staring at the same water and palm trees and making friends out of volleyballs for the rest of your days.”
• Megan, ever the artist, would pick The Coloring Book (and if she didn’t have markers with her, there’s always the option of pulling color from flower petals to create paint, which, incidentally, I learned about from my favorite book that takes place on a desert island, the Lost Girls books.)
• Michael would pick A Wrinkle in Time. And sure, it’s a fantastic book, but he’s got ulterior motives: he’d use the time to learn to tesseract.
• Lia went fancy on me and chose The Pillars of the Earth. She explains: “It’s so long that by the time I get to the end I tend to forget what happened at the beginning – a perfect desert island read.”
• And Nadia, having been told (by me) that choosing the entire Harry Potter series was cheating, finally settled on Gone with the Wind. “Scarlet O’Hara is a tough woman,” she says. “I could probably find some survival tips from her.” And how.

What would your desert island book be?