The art of discovering a favourite book by Jessica Harrison, Publishing Director of Penguin Classics.
How do you choose a favourite book? Is it the novel you discovered as a teenager, which opened your eyes in a thrilling new way to the world around you? Is it the book you completely lost yourself in, which relegated everything else around you to a vague background hum? Or is it your ultimate comfort read, the literary equivalent of a nice cup of tea and a biscuit?
Whatever criteria Dubray’s booksellers have used to make this very important decision, it’s wonderful to see so many classics among their excellent choices. As Italo Calvino – who wrote the seminal essay on the classics and why we read them – observed, ‘classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them’.
From Albert Camus’s Outsider on the beach in Algiers to S. E. Hinton’s teenage Outsiders making trouble in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this is a list that takes us around the world and draws us into lives less ordinary. Some of the books enchant with their unforgettable heroes and villains: the four March sisters growing up in New England; debauched Dorian Gray and his ghastly portrait; Elizabeth Bennet and her delightful dance with Mr Darcy. For others, it’s the ideas that provide the pull: the chilling dystopian nightmare that is Nineteen Eighty-Four, or John Berger’s surprising and provocative take on art in Ways of Seeing. Horror also features prominently, with not only Frankenstein and Dracula, but also Shirley Jackson’s two delicious masterpieces, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, making the cut.
‘ “Your” classic’, said Calvino, ‘is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it’. And a favourite classic is one we always want to press into others’ hands, and say: read this, I promise you won’t regret it.
