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.