For what it's worth, mine were:
Catch 22
Think (an intro to philosophy)
Killing Defence at Bridge (back when I played 5X per week this was my bible)
Oxford anthology of most published poems
and a book of NZ short stories

all chosen because I can read 'em over and over again

Photo album
Dictionary
One of the books from the Lonely Planet series (probably on the country I was moving to)
My newly acquired book on wines
I have a postcard sized art book given to me by a gallery owner.

Mine:
Little, Big
The Phoenix and the Mirror
Flannery O'Connor: Complete Stories
Tao Te Ching (probably the Le Guin version, despite its non-canonical nature)
A History of the Modern World (maybe I'll actually have time to read it on a desert island)

I-Ching
my book of chants (I'm kind of a Hindu)
Spiritual Midwifery
a book of Hafiz's poetry
Joy of Cooking

I might grab Gravity's Rainbow in a rush, but I actually prefer Thomas Pynchon's V. and thus would regret my haste for some unspecified amount of time on the island. To be honest, I'd have to hem and haw over the rest of my bookshelves. There's not an awful lot that I've re-read and so the read over and over criteria gives me some pause. It would probably be 3 non-fiction books and 2 fiction books if I followed my reading habits and the reality of what's on my shelf right now. Hmm...

Thucydides' History of the Pelopennesian War
Hamlet (or can I get the collected works instead?)
Catch-22
The Federalist Papers
Edible Plants of Desert Islands, vol. IV

Catch-22
Green and Golden Island
A Kind of Starlight (unpublished manuscript about my Grandfather's life)
The Stand (no, I don't care what you think)
Don't know what else - I would probably cheat and tale more books, less clothes.

Wow, Selfnoise's choices overlap mine twice!

Flanney O'Connor and the Tao Te Ching


The other three:

Head On by Julian Cope
Malicious Resplendence: The Lowbrow Art Of Robt. Williams
the biggest collection of J.G. Ballard short stories I could find

Edible Plants of Desert Islands, vol. IV
posted by sam 22 September | 18:07

Hah!!!

Desert Island:

-Gravity's Rainbow
-something by Burroughs, maybe The Ticket That Exploded or The Place of Dead Roads
-Flashman! or maybe one of the later more outré volumes in that series
-Something "good for me" and thick like Herodotus' Histories or some such
-Islandia or The book of the New Sun (does that count as one choice?)or D'Arconville's Cat or Little, Big or some other nice fat novel besides Gravity's Rainbow

If I was in Gaspode's situation I would pick 5 books in my library that I would probably have a great deal of difficulty replacing in another country:

-S. T. Joshi's biography of Lovecraft (this is the most inadvertently collectible book I own and I would like to read it again sometime without paying US$100+ for the privilege.)
-Fake! Clifford Irving's book about the art forger Elmyr de Hory
-Richard Foreman's Plays and Manifestos (hell, I had trouble finding that for a reasonable price in North America)
-His Share of Glory, the complete Short Stories of C.M. Kornbluth (that actually might be a candidate for the vague fifth slot on my desert island list)
-That neat book that John Cage compiled of reproductions of experimental scores from various composers. John Zorn submitted one that was pictures of cartoon characters superimposed on staff paper. May be disqualified because I'm not sure where my copy is. No wait, found it: it's called Notations.

Oh, yeah, Islandia's a good one for my list too. The title is kinda on-theme, and I haven't read it, and it's long.

Edible Plants of Desert Islands, vol. IV

Smartass. :)

Here are the books that I actually took to a new country:

The I ching (Hi specklet)
Invisible cities, by Italo Calvino
The Book, By Alan Watts
Some pocket guide books (spiders, stars, latin american spanish)
Lonely Planet Australia (im sure this doesnt count)