I can't get no sleep

james_davis_nicoll's most-recent Reactor article is about whether there's a difference between best and favourite books, and he quotes someone else saying

I’m very confused by the brain of anyone for whom "the work I think is best" and "my favorite" are not identical.

...which left me thoroughly boggled. Like, I'm not saying those are unrelated categories, but they are certainly not the same thing! Not to mention how many different things "best" can mean, besides.

There are certain books that I love whole-heartedly, but which I am very aware will not have universal appeal - Graydon Saunders' Commonweal books, Dorothy J Heydt's Interior Life, the Victoria Goddard Nine Worlds books... these are all books that hit very specifically for me, that provoke in me a deep emotional satisfaction, that I can critique, objectively, but fundamentally don't want to. I don't think any of them are bad books at all, but I wouldn't put any of them on a list of "best" books unless it was very a specialised subset ("best books about constructing a truly just government"??). And there are definitely books I felt were pretty trashy, but which were also so much fun to read I was perfectly happy to ignore the many flaws.

I think ultimately for me "favourite" is about personal impact, whereas "best" is about performance against more objective criteria - effectiveness at achieving a goal, quality of writing, compelling characterisation... like various of the commenters, there are absolutely things I have read and thought were objectively good, but also never want to read again. "All the characters are convincingly terrible people" is definitely one example of that for me... or "this was amazingly well-done but also so grindingly depressing I can't face ever reading it again".

Mansfield Park is my favourite Austen, but I'd probably say that Pride and Prejudice was her best (the plot is so perfectly balanced!) - and she thought it was Emma, which I can't bear, because the cringe is so strong.

What do you-all think?

This week is back to more-or-less normal life, and I'm sort of enjoying it and sort of watching all that extra free time whizz mysteriously past. I finished my latest batch of books, and have a new pile that look much more appealing than the last few I was dragging myself through; this is the fun part of the cycle. Of course in another couple of months I'll be cursing myself and my life choices, but the point of this is to actually get through all those books I wanted to read, and it's certainly effective at that.

The weather seems to be doing a thing where it's simultaneously gently descending into autumn and whiplashing between seasons; on Tuesday I sat outside in my cardigan for nearly an hour while the cleaner was here, and it was very pleasant, and on Wednesday I went outside with a jacket on and immediately thought "gosh that's nippy". The trees are gradually turning, the nights are closing in, yesterday morning was so gloomy I thought about putting the lights on... and then suddenly it'll be 20 degrees and sunny again.

I keep sort of vaguely thinking about making the world a better place, and things I can usefully do that won't require significant investments of time / energy / money (pick at least two), which of course is pretty futile, but. I'm feeling like I need to do something. On Tuesday I picked up a block of foam insulation stuff that someone had abandoned at the end of the path up to the road from my block and bagged it up for the rubbish collection, but even keeping myself down at that scale it's hard to keep up. I signed up to help transcribe audio interviews for the local queer archive; will have to find some time for that, but I'm hoping it's low-key enough to be sustainable!