I was faced with a tricky question recently: What is your favorite book?

Now, of course, there are a few scenarios where this question arises. It could be someone who doesn’t know what to do with you when you say your hobby is reading so they ask to be polite. It might be the reader who is very passionate about a favorite book or writer and wants to see if you feel the same. Or, like in my case, it was a fellow reader who knows it’s a trick question but is looking to get a conversation going about books and writers.

To me it’s a tricky question because my answer shifts. Depending on the audience, the time of year, the last thing I read, the weather outside, the way I felt when I woke up…  I always give myself a moment to take a breath and think before I answer. On this occasion it was Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I called her our living Charles Dickens except her books are mostly about women (complex, whole characters who come alive in your mind). Thankfully someone else at the party agreed and it led to a wider conversation just as the asker had hoped for.

So how else might I have answered the question?

Ten years ago, it would have been The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (if you are ever stuck to answer, a childhood favorite is an easy way out). A book with a main character who is bit nervous, a bit timid, a bit inexperienced and going on a big adventure. The older I get, the easier it is to see why I connected so fiercely with that book as a child.

Last year it was Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell for its perfect mix of myth and fiction, facts and research. And for the very real understanding of grief – all while giving the spotlight to the wife of a famous man.

In 2020 it probably would have been Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and The Light by Hilary Mantel for letting me escape lockdown.

Sometimes, when I’m vulnerable or struggling, it’s a book where I can spend time with a character feeling the same: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig or Piranesi by Susanna Clark or Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

Other times I’m pulled back to the classics and my answer is a Jane Austen novel. Persuasion if I’m feeling reflective or Northanger Abbey if I’m in a lighter mood.

So, the real question is am I simply fickle? Do my tastes change with the wind? Do I lack the loyalty of a reader who will stay with Stephen King or Jane Austen or Earnest Hemingway for years? I don’t think so, because even if my answer changes, my appreciation for the other books and writers doesn’t wane. Rather than a permanent ranking, it’s more like a growing collection. Every year I acquire new favorite books because the relationship between a book and its reader is like all art forms – there is conversation between the creator, the piece, and the audience. When we read, we are letting an author and their characters and observations into our minds, and perhaps into our hearts but we are also in control of where and when and how we read the work.

Tim O’Brien, famous for his anti-war fiction (and another of my favorites) has discussed the realization that he can control his writings but not his readers when a young man at a book event told him he enlisted in the army because of O’Brien’s work.

We may love a character the author wants us to be suspicious of or immediately dislike a main character the author loves. (Jane Austen notoriously knew she was writing a difficult main character with Emma and did it anyway and I’d say her bet certainly paid off.) It’s an interesting relationship. Sometimes we know we’re in a made up world and sometimes we don’t. We may take a description of a location as truth only to find out the author has never been there. (When James Joyce wrote Ulysses he was in Paris, which means his descriptions of Dublin are based off a memory rather than immediate experience.)

So as readers we play a role in what our favorite books will be. If we’re hungry we might appreciate the description of a meal laid before our main character more than if we just ate. If we’re smitten, we might love a monologue declaration of love more than if we’re heartbroken. We might immediately connect with a character’s experience or wonder what on earth the author is talking about. We might skip a description if it’s took long or linger over an author’s adjectives and prose.  

I’m sure there are books that I would have loved had they come to me at a different point. As I get older, I have become a more patient reader. If something doesn’t feel right, I will put it to the side and wait (not always of course, not every book is written for me and that’s okay too). If I had picked up Wolf Hall when it was first released, I was so busy at that point in my life I wouldn’t have had the time or energy to properly live within its pages and likely wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Had I read The Hobbit for the first time as an adult who had left home and travelled around the world maybe I wouldn’t have connected with Bilbo in the same way. If I had come across Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried after high school maybe I wouldn’t have written my master’s dissertation on the Vietnam War. And if I had found Jane Austen too late, maybe I wouldn’t have the romantic streak that keeps me from being too cynical.

So, my fellow readers, now’s the time to ask… what’s your favorite book?