What’s Your Favorite Book? No, Your Real Favorite Book

You remember those awful ice breakers in school? When you had to go around the room and tell everyone your name, and your favorite color, and a fun fact about yourself, and your preferred flavor of ice cream or whatever? Chances are good that none of these activities actually helped you get to know your classmates any better, and since they weren’t exactly deep or introspective prompts, they probably never inspired you to reevaluate anything about yourself either. Yet when I was in grad school I did get one ice-breaking question that made me think about things a little differently.

My professor asked the class: What’s your favorite book when you’re trying to impress people at a cocktail party…and then what’s your real favorite book?

It seems silly now, but that was the first time I ever consciously acknowledged how I tend to tailor my favorite book to suit whoever asked me about it. My go-to impressive book was always Never Let Me Go by Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. But with other audiences, my favorite book might be Harry Potter or something by John Green, since those are the books that I can read and reread without ever growing bored of them. And, of course, there are other times when people ask me my favorite book and I just freeze, paralyzed by the sheer multitude of books I’ve read and loved in my life. And sometimes my favorite book is literally just whatever book I most recently finished.