THE BEST BOOK I'VE READ - A "LET'S BLOG OFF" POST

I was delighted to be invited by Paul to participate in the fortnightly Let's Blog Off  event and, first of all,  I'll let him explain the concept here:

"Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something called a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same topic on the same day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is 'What's the best book you ever read?' "

Now, I'm the woman who brought 6,000 books to Sicily so an excuse to write about some of them is always welcome. But the best book I've ever read?  How was I going to choose?

Well, I suppose a lot depends on how you define "best":  if the book I'm reading at any given moment is unputdownable, I'm likely to think it's the best I've read - until I start the next one!  I read a lot of biography and among the most interesting I've read in recent years are:  Maria Fairweather's superb account of the life of one of my heroines, Madame de Stael;   the aptly entitled Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes;  An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina;  and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders.

But wait a minute:  what if I define "best" in terms of books that have influenced me?  My studies have led me to read in three languages other than my own so I must admit that my literary influences are many and diverse.  Coincidentally, the other day I took part in a vote in which people selected their favourite authors from Nobel Prize in Literature laureates: after much deliberation I chose Albert Camus, not for L'Etranger [The Outsider] but for La Peste [The Plague] which I read in French at school and which challenged and changed my thinking more than any other book.  Then there is Voltaire who taught me tolerance, Balzac - so little read these days but a must for anyone interested in human nature - and my beloved Simone de Beauvoir. Lorca's poetry sustained my late teens, Gramsci's Letters from Prison my extreme leftie phase and I must not forget, among the poets, Modica's own Salvatore Quasimodo;  little did I imagine, all those years ago as I burned the midnight oil writing essays on his work, that I would one day come to live in his town.

Suppose, though, I take "best" to mean the book I would most like to take with me to get me through a  period of enforced solitude - on that mythical desert island, perhaps?   This, I've concluded, is the "best" definition of "best", when it comes to books!  At first I thought I would take something long and easy to dip into, such as the Larousse Gastronomique, but then I realised that such a volume might actually cause me distress if I only had berries to eat.  My next idea was to fall back on poetry and, having narrowed my poets down to Verlaine and Burns, I decided that Burns [with a glossary] just had the edge.

And then I remembered something else:  some years back, when I had to go into hospital, I took along Pages  from the Goncourt Journal to pass the time and I forgot all indignities, pain and discomfort as the nineteenth century French authors I'd studied so long ago passed through the volume like friends.  I even said "Hello" out loud to some of them.  In my life, friendship has been very important so a book full of "old friends" such as these is - for the moment - the best book I have ever read.

Below is the full list of contributors to this Blog Off theme: