A Good Book

If asked to define my ‘favourite book of all time’ I will always enact a struggle, perusing the shelves in my mind and trying to grasp at the one book that can be put on a pedestal above all the rest. And yet, when pushed, the answer will always be the same. And it took the experience of being a bridesmaid to understand why.

I find the question of my “favourite” anything quite traumatic, selecting a film to watch, book to read, place to walk, music to listen to, colour to paint a wall… these things are always too closely tethered to mood. But ultimately, a “favourite” isn’t always the best technically, that with astounding cinematography, or evocative passages, breath-taking scenery, perfect harmonies or something aesthetically powerful — it’s something else, something less tangible.

Emma Watson said “I like books that aren’t just lovely but that have memories themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.” With the same wisdom of her fictional and equally well-read counterpart, Hermione — Emma is right. It is the act of delving through our emotional libraries that allows us to find those favourite things. When revisiting a good book, we can access a precise moment in our past, and reconnect emotionally with that version of ourselves.

Things physical to life rarely have this same power. When revisiting a place from your past that holds powerful memories, it often fails to meet expectations. If you go back to your primary school in adulthood — the place feels eerie; familiar yet alien, somehow crooked from the place in your mind. Returning to such places can often trample on your memories, not unlike how watching a film adaptation of a book endangers your own imaginings. But books — they are gateways to your past, undamaged by the passing of time with the power to conjure all those things you felt so long ago.

It was the night before my best friend’s wedding when I really understood the connection to “my favourite book of all time”. We were all dressed for bed, the bride to be, my fellow bridesmaid and I. All ancient friends, sat up in her childhood bed, echoes of our girlhood whispering from the walls. She opened the bedside drawer and withdrew a book. I grinned with glee. It was my favourite book of all time. I turned the pages, selected a chapter and began to read: “Chapter Five — In which Piglet meets a Heffalump”.

We giggled like children. And although I doubted if we had ever sat together before reading Winnie The Pooh, I knew that we were all accessing a similar moment from our childhood. One where our parents had sat next to us in bed, night after night, and taught us the tales of the Hundred Acre Wood. As I finished the chapter, and we all sighed in satisfaction that Winnie the Pooh was still there, unchanged by the twenty year absence; we went to bed and I slept soundly in the knowledge that I had been right to put A.A. Milne on this pedestal. His presence in my life is unchallengeable. The quotes still roll my tongue at particularly apt moments, “help Pooh, I’m unravelling!”, “If you look up — they drop on you” and “TTFN, Ta Ta For Now!”

We can close a book, and know it was a good story or we can close it and be completely devastated that the journey has ended. But it will always be there, waiting amongst the pages like an old friend for when you need it most.

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