My Favorite Books

People often ask me what my favorite books are. This is a tough question. In some ways it's easy because I do have two that I usually say, but there are so many others that I love. So I think it's best if I break my answer down into different categories.

Best overall books as an English-teaching adult: I have two here. The first is Beloved by Toni Morrison. This American author has already won the Nobel Prize for literature so she's very well-recognized for the stud writer that she is. In Beloved, she writes about a woman who has escaped slavery but has suffered so much before and after her escape. What I love about this book is the language. It's just beautiful and haunting and intense. I also feel like reading this book is the closest I could ever come to understanding what it must have been like living under slavery.

My second favorite adult book is Plainsong by Kent Haruf. This is a simple book and a simple story, but it, too, is beautiful. It's the characters in this book that I really love, especially the two old farmer brothers who take in a pregnant teen who has been thrown out of her house.

The next category for favorite books is books from my childhood that I read over and over. The leaders in this category are Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I remember one car trip to Florida when I ran out of books; I think I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory three times on that trip alone.

My final category is books that I have loved reading with my children. In this category would fall Where the Wild Things Are, How I Became a Pirate, Chica Chica Boom Boom, Jam Berry, and Stranger in the Woods. We've spent a lot of time together with these books. My husband has also read them all seven books in the Harry Potter series (this is thousands of pages--he's a trooper!). I had already read all of these books and my husband hadn't, so he claimed the right to read these outloud with them. If I'd read them to the kids, though, I would include all of these on my list, too.

So what makes a book a favorite? For me, the book needs most importantly to have good characters. I want to totally fall into these people's lives and live there with them. Of course, this can be depressing or scary, but that's the experience I want. I also judge a book on its language. One book I read, for example, used the word "phantasmagoric" three times! This is ridiculous. It's as if the author learned a new word and so had to use it as often as she could. I prefer language that is subtle but beautiful. It can be beautiful in its stark simplicity (like Plainsong) or beautiful in its richness and complexity (like Beloved). Ultimately, I think the combination of characters and language needs to change me. The book needs to stick with me and help me understand something new either about myself or about humanity or about a historical event or whatever else it's focusing on.

Reading back over this post, I realize I'm only talking about fiction here. Hmmm. I guess that reveals my bias. I have read some non-fiction, but it's not what I love. So, sorry about the narrowness of my favorites here. If I had to choose a non-fiction work that I really liked, I think I would choose Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. This is the story of Lewis and Clark and their search for a water route across North America. It's an amazing story! I'd love to follow their actual journey some summer! (I'd take the car, though, and forgo paddling/hauling a canoe upriver all the way!)

So what do you think? What are your favorite books? What do you think makes a book your favorite? I'd like to get input from others! :-)

--Kristen