I saw a Tweet the other day asking “What was the best book
you read in school?”
My flip response was “I could name one best teacher, maybe,
but best book, no way.” It isn’t just
the snobbery of having become an overeducated English Major (forgive the
redundancy) that makes it hard for me.
What was “best” when I was 10 (Prince Tom) had been
surpassed by many, many others only a few years later. But that fact did not diminish in any way the bestness
of that story about an adopted Cocker Spaniel.
There are also books that I once disliked and yet came to
reconsider and promote to “best.” Lord Jim was one. As I only understood decades later, what
spooked me was the guilt Jim feels for not protecting the passengers from the
Captain who abandons ship. The book was telling me a story I was not ready, at age 12, to
face. I did not want to know that
sometimes people who get drunk, even people you know, can be mean and
stupid. And you can’t stop them.
It is in this way that a book which I thought of as my worst
reading experience, one made more depressing because I didn’t know why it made
me so sad, became “best” book, when I re-read it as an adult.
I do not believe
there could ever be one best book in my life.
Best books are always plural, and always ones that I have
read several times, will re-read again, and can’t imagine having lived without reading
more than once.
That’s why I am working with a start-up company,
Gluejar, which wants to make sure anyone’s “best” book can be reread at any
time. We want to make sure no reader will see that book “out of
print” and lose the opportunity to remember the joy felt the first time she
called that book the “best book I’ve ever read.
Watch for more about Gluejar and our fundraising webstie, Unglue.it.
