Okay, this isn't a writing exercise so much as a thinking one. But it's valuable:

I've been re-reading my favourite book in the world: Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. Partly because I want something I know I can disappear into when I'm on breaks between moving, and partly because it's been years since I last read it, and I haven't ready my copy of The Year Of The Flood yet. As they're sort-of connected, it seemed like a good excuse.

I first read O&C when I was nineteen, with a small collection of other books on loan from a friend. I'm not entirely sure why I fell in love with it so much. On re-reading it, to be frank, it's not really living up to my memory of its incredibleness. But that doesn't diminish its place in my heart.

It was, I think, the first "adult" science fiction (sorry, Margaret) I'd ever read; the first what-if that had real thought and meaning behind it, and was about more than Defeating The Evil Empire. It was the first book I'd read where the future wasn't generic space formula and TechnologyAwesome, where the characters were more than a line-drawing, and the story arc couldn't be plotted with crayons. My first foray into future dystopia, human fallability and hubris, and speculative fiction with subtext.

It was also being read in contrast to some of the dreariest literary fiction I've ever had inflicted on me, thanks to my literature-worshipping creative writing classes at university. That probably had something to do with it. But I when I realised that Atwood was doing what my professors were talking about, and discussing themes and ideas that my professors were pointing to in more traditional literary works, I was floored.

I'd discovered speculative literature.

I suspect that's why this book remains so important to me. Not because the book itself beats out any other book in the universe (though, as Matthew Riley stated on the First Tuesday Book Club last week, Atwood can pretty much write whatever she likes) but because I saw the possibility of doing what I really wanted to do - discuss things that were important to me whilst playing with the what-if and the fantastic. And that's why I love this book.

So the thinking part of this exercise: what's your favourite book? If you can, I suggest re-reading it.  Look at it critically - does it, on its own merit, deserve your adulation? If not, what it is about that book that puts it above all others? Is it really only about the book itself, or is that book a symbol of another time, a meaning, a decision or discovery in your life? What makes it so special to you?