JENNIFER PLATT | Is it possible to have a favourite book of all time?

I always feel like a kid in the deadlights (a reference to Stephen King’s It explaining how the children were killed by Pennywise) when someone asks me if I have read anything good lately or what my favourite book is. I stumble over my words, trying to remember titles, authors’ names, and start to wonder if I do indeed have a favourite novel of all time? They also ask me to recommend books, which I can, but only if I know a little bit about them and their interests.

At the dentist this week, the receptionist asked me what’s good to read at the moment. I was flummoxed. Do I recommend the recent Booker longlist nominees, two of whom are South African — Damon Galgut for The Promise and Karen Jennings for An Island? Or do I tell her about the book I finished reading at 2am on Tuesday, The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris, which left me pondering until 3am why we westernise ourselves and what the ultimate costs are of always trying to fit in and be comfortable in a white person’s world? 

Or do I suggest she waits until the end of August, when Paula Hawkins’s third novel, A Slow Fire Burning, will be released? Hawkins’s publisher at Transworld, Sarah Adams, says: “I adore this book, which contains everything readers could possibly want from a Paula Hawkins thriller — a dark plot that grabs you and never lets up, characters that you believe in utterly, incredible pace and knock-you-sideways twists. Paula skilfully balances delicious touches of sharp, knowing humour with deeply affecting storytelling, so that we are powerfully enthralled from first page to last gasp. This confirms Paula as one of the most exciting commercial thriller authors writing today.” OK, I won’t be able to remember all that, but hopefully I can relate something similar.

Or what about The Skipper’s Daughter by Nancy Richards, which tells the remarkable story of her mother, who, at the age of only 16 in 1938, took to the sea?  

My neighbour, who admits he has only read two books in his life, asked what I recommend he reads before he dies. (He is hearty and healthy, I think).

I immediately suggested my go-to book, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Sad thing is, at one point I wondered if it could still be a favourite due to the posthumous release of her book Go Set a Watchman, now widely regarded as the awful first draft of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

To say Watchman was disappointing doesn’t quite do it. Former New York Times books editor Michiko Kakutani describes it aptly: “How did a lumpy tale about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father? How did a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech (from the casually patronising to the disgustingly grotesque — and presumably meant to capture the extreme prejudice that could exist in small towns in the Deep South in the 1950s) mutate into a redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement, hailed, in the words of the former civil rights activist and congressman Andrew Young, for giving us ‘a sense of emerging humanism and decency’.”

To Kill a Mockingbird was probably the only setwork I enjoyed in high school. My mother had never read it until I gave her my beaten-up copy. I remember us discussing it extensively one day after Sunday lunch and maybe because of that, no matter what, it will always remain one of my favourites.