Tomorrow I have to talk about my “favourite” book, and I am still mulling over what to say! What an impossibility was my first reaction; after all I have been reading for rather a lot of years – well actually since I was about four or five, I think! So what do I say? I could have said “no” I can’t, but didn’t want to disappoint the person making the request. So I guess I have to spend much of the time given to me explaining just why I can’t choose just ONE!
I realise that some of the possible choices were the same as I put on Facebook, and I still stand by them. To me a favourite is a book I can re-read, and I think it would be fair to say that I have re-read both Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre at least five or six times throughout my life – almost once in each decade? I recently picked up a copy of Pride and prejudice, and enjoyed it just as much as I did the previous times, while appreciating some nuances that I had probably missed earlier.
Others on my possible list would be Lewis Carroll’s Alice in wonderland and Through the looking glass. These I am sure I read or had read to me as a child, but when I came upon them as an adult, it was very different, yet still enjoyable on that totally different level, and I am neither a mathematician nor a chess player, so all those allusions still pass me by.
And lastly – but it isn’t really, really, lastly – I would put the Tintin series. I first read these graphic novels cum comics in French in Belgium, when I must have been around eight or nine, and that was in the 1950s. I don’t think I fully understood them, but the pictures were fun and carried the stories. And I remember having the whole collection – with additions for Christmas presents – at some point in my childhood, and they could be read, and re-read, and re-read, and passed on to others – my sister and brother.
And then rediscovered in all places at the Ashanti Regional Library of the Ghana Library Board in 1980/81 when I first joined them, and was in charge of the children’s library. I took them home, and everyone loved them, even if they couldn’t understand the stories fully – kids, teens, husband, even husband’s friend! And I myself found myself with new enthusiasm entering the world of Snowy, Captain Haddock and the Thompson/Thomson twins as well as Professor Calculus (though I still prefer his French name, Tournesol).
I saw them somewhere recently in Accra, and it was very, very hard to resist!
Accra books and things 
you did well, limiting yourself to only three. I know I couldn’t.
Congratulations, you really did well choosing a one favourite book. But surely chooising all might be easier. And still nicer is when relatives, near, far, distant and remote will join you!