My Favorites: Day Ten

My Favorite Book

This seems like a standard “My Favorite…” subject. Everyone should have a favorite book or at least a handful that they can hem and haw over if they’re asked. It actually kind of feels like a first-date type question; the answer reveals not only if they are a reader, but what type of person they are. What I’m getting at is that there is an odd amount of pressure with this post.

I don’t want to come across as being an intellectual snob by listing the books that everybody knows but nobody reads, nor do I want to come across as being completely aloof by going with Where’s Waldo. With that in mind and much like when I’m at the bookstore, you can’t go wrong with Oprah. “Is it any good? It’s got the Oprah Book Club stamp of approval! It must be good.”

You might, however, go wrong using a method that could be called “the Muted Guerrilla Mentioned It.” Yep, recent books I’ve mentioned in passing are Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the Sookie Stackhouse books (aka the I-know-you-think-it’s-disturbing-that-I-am-sleeping-with-a-vampire-because-I-can-read-your-mind books), and Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom (for unseen and extraordinary reasons, this post was fully written but was never published… I blame Jeff. Plus it was during the tie challenge and I wasn’t hurting for posts. I use it as an example because it fits well with the others.).

All of those are good in their own weird way, but I would not have described my literary tastes as being so… undeadly, but you are what eat, I suppose. And that gets back to that first-date question. Fortunately, I do read enough other garbage that I could think of something else to say, and therefore not scare anybody away.

So, all that being said, for My Favorite Book, I am going to say… East of Eden. This is a book that borders on the literary snobbery as it was written by Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck, but I picked it up at a library book sale because it had the Oprah Book Club stamp of approval! Plus, it’s hell-a-good. Hell-ah!