When some one asks what your favorite book is, does your brain shut down? Mine does. How do you choose just one? With all the different genres and formats I enjoy, is it fair to rank books regardless of those distinctions? No, I don't think it is. And is a piece of writing deserving of less merit because it is not a novel, but rather a play, poetry, or a short story? Those are books, or grouped in books at least.
As far as favorite short stories go, I thought I would have to go with Ray Bradbury's The Foghorn. But then one of my brothers mentioned The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber by Ernest Hemingway, and I thought how excellent THAT story was. Which made me think of A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor. They both had startlingly violent endings. As I climbed down into the subbasement of my brain's library, other authors floaedt up. Saunders, Nabakov, Thurber...You know what? Let's leave the short stories for now.
Poetry? Which kind? Epic?. My favorite epic poem would have to be Evangeline, by Longfellow. But what about Homer's Iliad, or Spenser's the Faerie Queen? Pastoral poetry is an easy toss up between Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman. Oh, no wait, what about Virgil? Darn. And those are just two of the fifteen to fifty types of recognized poetic forms.
Plays? Instantly my mind went to Henry IV, Part 1, by Shakespeare. I'm not trying to appear super erudite here, it's just a really interesting and surprisingly funny play. Then as I thought about humor, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest is great. And what about Our Town, the heartbreaking snapshot of the rural United States in the early 1900s? In one line Thornton Wilder broke us all down. (Don't know the line? Read it!)
Which leads us in to the original question, what's your favorite book? I'm sorry to tell you, but I'm not going to tell you. I'm not trying to be cagey, I just don't have an answer. My favorite book, if by book you mean novel, is probably thirty different books. Okay, fine, here's a few of them, in no particular order:
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern
The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster
A Gentleman of Moscow - Amor Towles
Island - Aldous Huxley
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Márquez
See? I can't stop listing! How about you go? What's YOUR favorite book(s)?

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