Day one of the 30 Book Challenge. I’m not particularly tied to doing 30 individual posts, so I thought I’d do three at a time, or however many I feel like.

One: Favorite Book

Confession time. I don’t have a favorite book. There isn’t One Book to Rule Them All. It really depends on the genre, the day, and what I’ve been reading lately.

So, favorite book I’ve read this summer? Probably Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda.

Other favorite books: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Over to You by Roald Dahl, The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien and the 44 Scotland Street series by Alexander McCall Smith.

Two: Least Favorite Book

Surprisingly, this is an easy one for me to answer. It’s easily The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenger. You can read my reasons. To summarize: The romance struck me as creepy, the blind acceptance of determinism, and lack of morality and logistics.

Three: Book that Makes You Laugh Out Loud

It takes a really special book to make me laugh out loud. It takes an even more special book to make me cry. That rarely happens when reading.

But back to the laughter. There are a couple of books that have reduced me to stitches. Closing Time by Joseph Heller (the sequel to Catch-22) had me giggling at the Kafka jokes most of all.

The most out-loud guffaws I’ve had while reading has been in my rereading of the 44 Scotland Street books. This reading has been closer. My favorite has been a comment on the length of modern sentences versus Proustian ones.