When I was teaching high school history I would talk about how my favorite book was The Sun Also Rises when covering the Lost Generation.

Well, I was with one of the English teachers at the time and we went through a pretty public divorce during the school year. Nothing dramatic, but we went from “the married couple” to “the divorced teachers.”

I had a lot of awesome students that year, and at the end of the school year I had one gift me a copy of The Sun Also Rises hardcopy.

On the inside cover she wrote a short note thanking me for the time, energy as encouragement I gave her that year. Down at the bottom she wrote ”I hope you find all the happiness you’re looking for.”

I obviously already owned a copy, but now I have two, and that one is my favorite.

Preferred medium is pretty unimportant to me. I don’t like long TV dramas (e.g. breaking bad, mad men, etc.), but I understand why people watch them. People like what they like, and that’s cool.

For instance, I think video games are an amazing medium for storytelling that has really matured in the past 15 years with its level of writing and characterization. But some people will still say “video games are for kids,” when that’s just factually wrong.

I think doing the opposite by putting books up on a pedestal as “the mature medium” is just as dubious.

All mediums have their benefits and drawbacks.

Here’s a weird one:

A Separate Peace and Never Let Me Go

I know some English teachers I’ve worked with basically have to read to their classes to get anyone to read, which leads to beating a single book into he ground.

E.g. a colleague of min once spent over a month on Streetcar Named Desire. And back when I was in school I had a buddy choose to be in on-level English and as seniors they read Frankenstein…over the course of a full semester…

Damn. I never read CoD but read his book Neon Bible and enjoyed it a lot. Especially considering he was like 16 when he wrote it, it was impressive.

What Moves the Dead by Ursula Vernon basically refused to let me put it down until I was done with it.

It’s not my typical book choice and it absolutely captivated me.