At the end of the 1960 version of the movie The Time Machine, Mrs. Watchett, the housekeeper of H.G. Wells’s alter ego George, discovers three empty spaces on the book shelves. George’s friend Filby asks what three books Watchett would have taken (to aid the Eloi in the year 802,701 A.D.), a question that goes unanswered.

Also unanswered, at least for me, is whether The Time Machine, or any other Wells work, is included in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I didn’t think to ask Musitch and the alphabetical by author excerpt on Amazon doesn’t make it to W. Perhaps I should travel back in time and ask Musitch, or, I could buy the book.

Interestingly, Wells’s book doesn’t pose the question about what books to take. And the 2002 movie remake starring Guy Pearce circumvents it by including a photonic librarian in the future who has the knowledge contained in all the books ever published. That’s more memory than my iPhone.

Pearce also plays a character in the movie Memento, suffering from anterograde amnesia, who has short term memory loss approximately every five minutes, so really no point in reading any books. And, while it seems like that would make learning lines difficult, as Marlon Brando demonstrated, memorization is unnecessary as long as you have a fellow actor like Robert Duvall in the Godfather holding up cue cards against his body for your benefit.

Brando said it helped with his spontaneity.  I wonder if I could have used that excuse in order to bring a cheat sheet to an exam. I recall that Woody Allen said he was thrown out of college for cheating on a metaphysics exam when he looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to him.

Musitch demonstrated a healthy memory, rattling off knowledge and opinion about books and authors I’ve never heard of, but I bet I know more about Seinfeld, Law and Order, and The Big Bang Theory episodes than he does.