#I hope this doesn't come across like om picking on Percy Jackson unfairly I just used it because it was the example given in the article

[opossum-pity-party]

I really didn't want to derail the very valid conversation on this post, but I do have some thoughts. Namely, thoughts on what constitutes a "favorite" book. Go check out that post (and read the article) and then come back here.

In the Atlantic article, one of the professors laments that their students often say that Percy Jackson is their favorite book instead of classic literature. Which, when taken in a larger conversation about declining literacy, is very concerning. Adult college students should not still be reading at a 5th grade level. But that's not what I want to talk about here. This post isn't about literacy.

One of the commenters on that post made a brief comment about students no longer lying about their favorite book. And that got me thinking about the difference between "favorite" books and "influential" books. While similar, I don't believe they are the same thing. Nor should they be.

Favorite books occupy a very special place in people's lives. If they discovered the book early enough in life, it can become so intertwined with the person they grew up to be that its impossible to separate the two. I don't think it's outrageous to assume that for many of those students, Percy Jackson was the book series that made them fall in love with reading in the first place. It was the gateway drug to literature, so to speak.

But I think what that professor was really asking his literature students was "what is your most influential book?" And that is entirely different. An influential book is what got you interested in studying literature in the first place. While children's books like Percy Jackson are great for encouraging reading, they don't necessarily inspire people to pursue college degrees. An influential book is what inspires you to do that. This is where you get Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and to To Kill a Mockingbird. This is where classic literature comes into play. Which is not to say that these two categories cannot overlap. Your favorite book can also be influential.

This is not to pit one group against the other. I hope it's obvious, but if not I'll make myself blantaly clear. While populist fiction and classic literature serve different purposes, both are utterly vital and necessary to becoming a well rounded reader.

I never studied English literature in higher education, but I did go to film school, where there exists a variation of this same argument. Favorite films versus influential films had pretty much the same divide. While the film cannon isn't as old and established as the literary cannon, there are still undisputed "classic" films. And there are populist films.

My favorite movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas. An animated children's movie. It has been my favorite movie since I was 4 years old. I watched the DVD hundreds of times as a kid. It is so enmeshed into my personality that I don't know how to give a different answer to that question. But the movie that inspired me to apply to film school is The Sixth Sense. A very different film, arguably one of the classics.

My point to all of this rambling is that we shouldn't judge people too harshly on their favorite anything. Favorite is an incredibly personal label, something I think a lot of people find and establish as children. And just because someone's "favorite" is something made for children, we shouldn't assume that they've never broadened their interaced with more complicated media ever in their lives. But also, if your favorite media is aimed for children you HAVE to broaden your horizons in order to grow as a person.