Booking Through Thursday is an amazing site. It is updated each week with a new prompt to make you think about reading, what you are reading, how you are reading and why you are reading. There have been a couple of prompts that have made me stop and think. Are “best” and “favorite” the same thing? If someone asked you “What’s the best book you ever read?” would the answer be the same as for “What’s your favorite?” My first thought is that "best" would refer to quality and "favorite" would refer to an emotional attachment but what if a favorite book is a "good" book. Happily, I don't have a favorite book; I have many favorite books and most of them are "good" books. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of my favorite authors and his book The First Circle is one of my favorite books. 

Another prompt: We all know the beauty of reading a really wonderful book for the first time—when everything about the story and the writing and the timing click to make a reader’s perfect storm … but it’s fleeting, because you can never read that book for the first time again. So … if you could magically reset things so that you had the chance to read a favorite book/series again for the first time … which would you choose? And why?And then, since tastes change … Do you think it would have the same affect on you, reading it now, as it did when you read it the first time? Would you love it just as much? Would you risk it? When I first read Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, I was totally in love with the book but a few months ago I went back and reread it. I was amazed at how misogynistic the book is and is a complete reflection of the man and the times it was written. And yet, The Old Man and the Sea is a very beautiful book. A good book should be timeless. I do go back and reread books but with a more critical eye.

And while we’re thinking about books converted to tv/movies. Do you ever sit and wonder who could be cast as your favorite characters? (Please feel free to give examples!) What actors do you think have done particularly excellent jobs with some of your favorite characters?  One more to think about.