#FavoriteBookPrompts

How many times have you been asked What’s your favorite book? I usually come up with ‘That depends’ which is clearly asking for more information. I connected with Jessica Norrie when she reached out to me about her book, The Magic Carpet. She is an ex-teacher and I could not resist asking her about her favorite book. Little did I realize that I was actually asking a very tough question. But, like a true teacher, she analyzed my prompt and had so much more to offer in her answers! This is how we have arrived at some #FavoriteBookPrompts!

If you are looking for some direction to find your favorite book as well,

• Answer as many of the seven questions as you can (or focus on one! Have fun with it!)
• Use #FavoriteBookPrompts
• Link to this page as the origins
• Share your link below and on social media

Jessica’s answers are thought-provoking as well as guiding, in how you can use the prompts with your kids and book discussions with all ages! Happy reading!

The generous and hospitable Kriti Khare asked me for a guest post about “My Favorite Book”, including elements of professional development for teachers. This is partly because I was a teacher for thirty years and partly because I in turn asked her to feature my second novel The Magic Carpet, which is about the power of storytelling and how stories help children, families and communities to grow.

The problem is I don’t have a favorite book. Or rather, my favorite book changes with the seasons, my mood, and frankly also with my memory, which can absolutely thrill to something and completely forget it two days later. I’m hoping this is due to information overload rather than age.

So despite having written many guest posts, this assignment intimidated me a bit (not Kriti’s fault)! It was a salutary reminder how of how thinking about books, which should first and foremost provide pleasure, can sometimes be demanding whether you’re a school pupil or an adult in a book group.

Teacher: Homework today is to write about your favorite book.
Children: Our minds are blank.

I think the task needs breaking down. Suggesting categories or prompts is always helpful, and the golden rule is – anything’s acceptable. If you can picture the cover but not the title, remember the characters but not what they did, have a favorite that nobody else has heard of – that’s fine. If the film version comes to mind first, that’s fine too.

Here are some examples:

#FavoriteBookPrompts Number 1

What’s my/your/the children’s favorite book about…(could be sport, young love, music) – on this occasion I’ve chosen food?

That shouldn’t be hard for young children – Green Eggs and Ham, Avocado Baby… For teenagers, maybe the dangers of starvation and the relief when food supplies get through, in The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Are novelists for adults a bit aloof when it comes to writing about food, or have cookery writers developed such an art that we turn to recipe books instead?

Perhaps food wasn’t such a good choice of theme, as my own mind is blank now.

Teacher note: Always test an assignment on yourself first.

#FavoriteBookPrompts Number 2

What’s my/your/the children’s favorite book …to read aloud?

Aside from poetry, which is often best read aloud or even sung, anything written in a lyrical, stylised way works well. I’m moved from the title onwards by Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and more recently by last year’s dense, fascinating, funny, horrifying Milkman by Anna Burns, which both is and isn’t based on a young girl growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Read aloud, it would be doubly powerful.

The Mousehole Cat by Antonia Barber had me in enjoyable tears when I read it to my children at bedtime. A cat watches from the window of a Cornish fishing village for her fisherman owner to return safely from a stormy trip to sea, when there will finally be food on the table again. (And so, we return to no 1.) Teacher note: often categories overlap.

#FavoriteBookPrompts Number 3

What’s my/your/the children’s most admired plot?

One of the best page turners I’ve read is Pompeii by Robert Harris and that’s weird because after all we know what happened in Pompeii! The main character is a young water engineer sent from Rome to investigate why the city aqueducts are failing. We know, but he doesn’t, that the water table is disturbed because Vesuvius is about to erupt. At times we’re so caught up in the taut writing we even think he may survive and recorded history may not happen.

An older British writer, the late Joan Aiken, twisted together plots for children that kept everyone guessing right to the last page. It’s no surprise she also wrote detective novels for adults. We could ask children to identify the key points, or we could just let them enjoy the yarn. Teacher note: you don’t always have to do something with a book.

#FavoriteBookPrompts Number 4

What’s your favorite laugh-out-loud book?

One that has you doubled up with giggles… Most children won’t need any help with this – they return to the same jokes repeatedly with the same relish every time. I know my son did, to Captain Underpants. I came to dread the Captain – but have my own favorites in Shirley Jackson or Bill Bryson. Teacher note: Just enjoy. Never ask children or adults to analyse why something’s funny – it’s a death knell.

#FavoriteBookPrompts Number 5

What’s my/your/the children’s favorite book title?

Does it run off the tongue? Does it intrigue? Is it plain weird?

Teacher note: This quick question should get pupils rummaging through the library shelves. It’s a great discussion starter, helpful for reluctant readers, could be an art activity too. Do you need to read the book? Not necessarily. You can use the title for your own story/ play / poem/ game.

#FavoriteBookPrompts Number 6

What’s your favorite horror book?

I don’t have one. I don’t want to read about horror. Wait – do you mean real life horror? Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, The Diary of Anne Frank, Beloved by the late, great Toni Morrison? We don’t really need to invent horror for entertainment do we? It’s all around us. Teacher note: I don’t believe in horror for children – ghosts, yes, but not horror.

#FavoriteBookPrompts Number 7

Which book has the strongest sense of place, for you?

I’ve explored Kerala via Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small things and Jamaica and Dominica in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Rhys wrote equally brilliantly about Paris. My lifelong fascination with Japan began in childhood after I was given Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden. I learned about colonial exploitation and injustice from Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins – whose teenage indigenous heroine may also have taught me enough to keep me alive on a lonely island off the Californian coast.

My final teacher note with this category is that increasing studies show reading fiction makes people more empathetic. It follows that reading fiction set in unfamiliar cultures opens our eyes to similarities between human beings everywhere, to the fact that we live in one world and must cooperate if we as a species and our habitat are to continue. And younger we start, the more tolerant, the better informed, and the more mutually supportive we’ll be.

Is that enough? Did I do my assignment right? I hope it was helpful to some of you, and good luck with your reading and your teaching!

©Jessica Norrie 2019

Jessica indeed passed her assignment with flying colors! Like I mentioned above, if you are looking to have some fun with #FavoriteBookPrompts,:

• Answer as many of the seven questions as you can (or focus on one! Have fun with it!)
• Use #FavoriteBookPrompts
• Link to this page as the origins
• Share your link below and on social media (the tweet above has both our handles)!

I’m looking forward to answering them myself in the future.

If there are other prompts you would like to add to this list, let me know if the comments and we’ll start building a list. After all, book lovers know best about favorite books. 🙂

Connect with Jessica yourself!

Featured Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash