the perfect book

it's okay to admit you have a favourite book

Three things happened the year I was twelve. One, I got my first period, which I was not thrilled about in the slightest, and did not feel equipped to deal with yet. My parents told my siblings to leave me alone that week, my dad got me a stuffed toy frog, and my mom got me a Lip Smackers pouch with the lip balm, nail polish, and glitter gel, all coordinated. I sulked on the couch and wore pants I hated, just in case.

Two, I was diagnosed with keratoconus, which I’ve written about at length and will certainly continue to write about - as it has shaped how I’ve experienced the last twenty years of my life. I was also not thrilled about this! Though I was getting contacts, which might make me cooler? (They didn’t and actually I don’t like wearing contacts and would wear glasses every happily if I could.) I didn’t want to deal with this, really, I had other problems. Like my period, which I’d just gotten. Also my skin was a mess and I wanted to get my ears pierced and I was now allowed to stay home by myself instead of going to my sibling’s hockey practices. I had stuff to do. An eye disease was not on the agenda.

Three, I read my very favourite book for the first time. As a voracious reader, there’s always some kind of resistance to admitting you have a favourite book. “There are so many amazing books! How can I choose just one?” And maybe this is the case for you. I agree, there are lots of amazing books and I’m so happy that I’ve been able to read so many of them in my life. I hope to read many more. But I have a favourite book. The book I think is essentially perfect, the book I’ve read every year at least once since the year I was twelve, the book I love so much that I have a DRM-free copy on my computer and my ereader, just in case.

In case there’s an emergency and I must have this book on hand? I don’t know. There’s no such thing as an emergency where you’d need your favourite novel. Regardless, I have it covered. I also have the audiobook. Again, just in case. (In case I finally go blind and need to read it before I master Braille? I DON’T KNOW.)

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith was the book I read during the summer I was twelve. I was staying with my cousins, and my older cousin decided to take matters (her sister and I reading books that weren’t that good and could be better) into her own hands, and brought a selection of her books to us to read. One of these was I Capture the Castle. We both devoured it.

Later that summer, I purchased my own copy with my allowance. I got the same copy as I had read the first time, in all its early 2000s glory. For the record, this book is set in the 1930s. This is objectively the worst cover it has ever been printed with, and if the picture didn’t give away the time it was published, the blurb from She Who Must Not Be Named must. It was the first thing I’d ever seen her blurb, and we were almost at her peak popularity then. Anyway, clearly a different time!

I could replace my copy, but I’ve carried it on numerous trips, it’s lived in every place I have, it sits in a prime spot on my bookshelves, and I have loaned it to numerous friends. I love this book. And it’s not a wildly remarkable book, insofar as the plot goes, it’s just really well-written and just wonderfully right. The pacing is excellent. The characters are vivid all well-fleshed out, even the minor ones. It’s quirky, but not off-puttingly eccentric. It’s a book I have loved in many different ways since that first summer: every time I read it, I relate to it differently, or find something new. Isn’t that a rare treat with a story? To be able to carry it through life like that.

I Capture the Castle is written as the journal of Cassandra, seventeen and living in a crumbling castle in the village of Godsend in Suffolk. Her family is desperately poor: her father is an eccentric author who quit writing after going to jail briefly, despite a wild success with his first book; there’s also Topaz, Cassandra’s stepmother, an artist’s model; Rose, Cassandra’s sister, who is strikingly beautiful but otherwise has no talents; Thomas, her brother, a schoolboy they all dote on; and Stephen, the handsome son of their late housekeeper, who’s wildly in love with Cassandra and has nowhere else to go. In the darkest year of their poverty so far, they see a possibility: the wealthy grandson and heir of the estate of Scoatney arrives to take up the house.

Obviously this is inspired a bit by Jane Austen’s work - which is referenced throughout - but it’s also a much more current version and one which really is timeless. The early 2000s picture on the cover aside, with a valiant attempt to convey antiquity with a stick-like fountain pen, there is very little in this book, particularly for ignorant North Americans like myself, to give away the time period. It’s both of its time and not at all.

What’s really the star is Cassandra’s way of telling Rose’s story, as Cassandra isn’t the main heroine of her journal. It’s my ideal kind of Künstlerroman: it covers less than a year, it’s intense and fanciful, and it’s not overly happy, but it is dreamy. For a daydreaming little bookworm such as myself, it hit all of my desires in a book right away, and has continued to do so, even as I’ve aged well past the main characters. I have felt for Cassandra, I’ve identified with Rose, and in later years, I’ve come to appreciate Topaz even more. There are so many books to read, but this is the one I’ll never let go. There’s a feeling you get when reading the first line of any brilliant book, the way it grabs you and pulls you, and so I’ll leave you with the opening line of this one:

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”