Ugh, favourite books. I'm not much for choosing favourites. It seems like that's pretty common, especially when you're quite familiar with a thing. Like, I'm not sure how many chefs have favourite foods, or how many musicians have favourite songs. It's always a case of "one of my favourites," rather than absolutes.
Still, for a long time I've stuck to one list of four favourite books, and when I noticed that two of them fell beside one another on the list, I thought that would be a great opportunity to read all four of them in a row, for the first time ever. Hence my season of favourites, because I'm such an infrequent poster that it will take an entire season to post about all of them.
I read all of these books for the first time before I finished high school (and I'll tell you more about that in the individual reviews), and except for one I haven't read them since. So I'm writing this before revisiting them, with what I hope will be good results. I suspect that I've liked other books more than these, but the fact is that these all had big impacts on me, plus they strike a lot of my particular themes and techniques of choice: strongly voiced first person narration, religion, subversion of religion, fooling around with language, growing up, humour, and so on.
For the past few years, as I've gotten further and further from these books, I've found myself reconsidering calling them favourites. I've enjoyed a lot of books I've read in this past decade, and I've questioned whether this list should be as static as it's been. So I guess I'm about to find out whether any of these should be dethroned. I'm more than a bit nervous about that.
So unfortunately I don't have much time to linger over this. More thoughts to follow in the reviews and when I wrap this up!
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