“What’s your favourite book?” It should be a simple question for someone like me, but it really isn’t.
People often ask me what my favourite book is. I suppose it’s a natural question to ask a writer and/or a keen reader. I usually do give an answer, but it’s a different one every time. At a fundamental level, I don’t really understand the question.
In my lifetime, I’ve read thousands of books. Some have been duds, and some mediocre or quickly forgettable, but that still leaves a huge number of excellent books, all with completely different merits. How do I begin to choose between them?
Regular readers of this blog will know that I love the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges—you have to love a book to embark on a years-long project of reviewing all 100+ Borges stories. But is it my favourite? If I’m in the mood for genre-bending intellectual explorations in a literary cloak, absolutely. But sometimes I’m in the mood for a classic novel or a book of history, philosophy, contemporary literary fiction, politics, or something completely different. How can I discount all the wonderful books I’ve read in those categories?
I can make a case for several dozen books being my favourite book, and even as I do so, I’m thinking of other books I’ve loved and wondering how I can leave them out. It’s not indecisiveness—it’s something else.
Let me try to illustrate it with another example from the world of colours. Again, my “favourite colour” changes every time I answer the question. I can spend hours staring at the beautiful shades of green in the fields surrounding my little cottage in rural Serbia, but I have also been dazzled by the brilliant blues of various seas around the world.
And then there’s orange—that can be quite a beautiful colour.
Is orange a better colour than blue? The question doesn’t make any sense to me. I can think of different situations in which I’d choose any colour in the rainbow. How can I limit myself to one colour, when it’s the kaleidoscope that I value?
Ask any of the standard “getting to know you” questions, and I find myself similarly stuck. Favourite music? I love both Jimi Hendrix and Puccini, for entirely different reasons. Favourite season? I’m with the Chinese poet Wu Men:
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
This is the problem I face when asked to choose my favourite book. Just when I’m thinking about the ten thousand flowers, I remember the cool breeze.
I suppose I’m overthinking things. The point of these questions is not so much the book itself as what it says about you. People simply want to know if you’re the kind of person who likes an uplifting romance novel or a challenging piece of literary fiction.
But then again, that raises problems for me too, because I reject the notion that there is a particular kind of person who likes a particular type of book. I think this way of labelling people according to their preferences is a lazy shorthand, a way of putting people into boxes. Getting to know a new person is a complex and fascinating process, and I don’t want to shortcircuit it by reducing those complexities into “red or green”, “Libra or Pisces”, “Dostoevsky or Woolf”.
So perhaps that’s at the root of my difficulty in choosing a favourite book. I know that any choice I make will not only be merely one of my many favourite books, but it will also immediately introduce a whole lot of assumptions that may or may not be accurate. So if you want to get to know me, don’t ask me my favourite book. Set aside a bit more time, and let’s have a proper conversation instead.
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If you are overthinking this question, then so am I. In fact, one of my 2026 goals is to post about favourites: even just, say, one favourite book out of an author’s oeuvre (not so big an ask as “favourite book” at least), to try to find a way to approach this idea because I feel like it’s niggled at me for my whole life. I envy the readers who are so quick to pick a “favourite Dickens novel” or a “favourite political writer”. (I can’t even choose a favourite dessert and I love dessert too. lol) One bookfriend is just fab with picking favourites and I love hearing about them. So … I want to reciprocate. But I think, maybe, I’m just not built for it?
I always love hearing your recommendations, Marcie, and have added many a book to my TBR after reading your posts and comments. So maybe picking a favourite doesn’t matter – maybe it’s enough to say, “I loved this book/movie/whatever,” without adding that (to me) impossible next step of “and it’s better than every other one out there.”
I can’t answer this question either, reading over a hundred every year, and not being so young…
Though I think I can say at least what my favorite French novel is : le Grand Meaulnes
That’s a good start, Emma! And it’s one I haven’t read, so I’ve added it to my lengthening list of books to be read 🙂
I am totally with you. I have read thousands of books over my life and whilst I have many favourites, picking out just one is virtually impossible – it would depend on my mood and what day of the week it was, if nothing else!!
Ah yes, mood and day of the week are big factors to consider for me too!
A couple of years ago another blogger – LouLouReads maybe – published instead of ‘ten best books’, her ten favourite books, emphasizing the difference. My favourite book growing up was PC Wren’s Beau Ideal, which influenced me greatly about the nature of love and loyalty (I’m not sure I was a very realistic young man).
One reason it is harder to have one favourite now I’m at the other end of my life might be that one book can no longer represent all that I think (and given that my other favourite book in the 1960s was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, about the Communist revolution in America, it probably couldn’t back then either).
Good point about age – I do think it’s easier to be obsessed by a particular book when you’re younger than it is when you’re older and have more perspective. Interesting choices – I haven’t read them, but from reading the summaries I can see the appeal.
I was thinking about this too, in the sense that it was a phrase I answered quickly when I was a kid (when adults would ask, for instance, what’s your favourite subject at school, and my favourite books and authors back then were simple to answer, and the favourite colour Thing you mention… whether it’s simply a matter of exposure. You only know twelve books and two authors and some of them you don’t even like one bit… so it’s easy to choose a “favourite”. So is it simply a matter of scale, that when one knows eleventybillionandtwelve books and eleventybillionandtwo authors, then it’s a matter of managing a huge data set? But we all have spreadsheets (even if we don’t use them for books) so that can’t be the whole story… I think it must be shifting ideas about who we are and how we see ourselves in the world, which of course change over time, sometimes to the point where earlier favourites can be embarrassing even … how can all THAT fit into a soundbite.
Haha, you’re right about exposure! Even with spreadsheets, it’s a lot harder to pick a favourite when you know so many good books. I do think our ideas shift, so favourites will change over time – Bill’s comment is a good illustration of that. But for me it’s not so much about long shifts over decades – my favourites shift from day to day and mood to mood!
I totally understand your predicament, I think all avid readers have that. Even if you can pinpoint your most favourite today, tomorrow it might be another one. And yes, as we get older, more books are added and make it even harder.
Hey Marianne, Glad I’m not the only one 🙂 It always feels like a question I should be able to answer easily.