You want to know what book I love? Me too. I’m looking at my bookshelf and I’m trying to decide which one I really love the most. My eyes keep jumping from dust jacket to dusk jacket and I I keep thinking with every new cover, this is the book I love. But I love so many. I want to write about just one.

I want to tell you how the 3rd Harry Potter is the book which made me read and love Harry Potter. The third book is the reason I get goosebumps on my neck when I hear the words, “Not my daughter, you bitch.”

I want to tell you how Ender’s Game taught me about my love for sci-fi. It was the book that made me giddy to go to a book reading by Orson Scott Card so I could have him autograph my book. It’s the same book I got for my fifth grade birthday from one of the very few people I trust to recommend books for me to read. It’s the same book that I don’t let people borrow because the autograph is so precious to me and because I’ve read the book so many times, it’s starting to fall apart.

But how can I write about my favorite book when I have a shelf full of Calvin and Hobbes books. These comics were the reason I love reading so much. I got Revenge of the Babysat from my grandparents the same day my brother and sister got the same books. I read through it over and over and over. There isn’t a Calvin and Hobbes strip I haven’t read. I know and love these books so much that in high school my French teacher put one up on the overhead projector with the French translations and she asked us to try to figure out what it said. I knew the pictures so well that I was able to give her an exact translation, word for word. She said it wasn’t quite right, but I knew the truth.

Really, though, I am going to talk about The Hero with a 1000 Faces. Even thinking about it, this seems like an odd choice to talk about for a book I love but I really do love it. If you’re unfamiliar with the book, it was written by Joseph Campbell to use as a textbook for one of his university courses and it outlines the Hero’s Journey. When you break it down, it’s little more than a textbook with hardly any narrative. Somehow, it’s full of stories and is interesting throughout. While reading it, I hardly notice that it’s a textbook.

Maybe the book appeals to me because the Star Wars nerd in me knows the Hero’s Journey so well and I can relate to all the aspects of it by following Luke’s story. George Lucas has said it was a big inspiration for him. Or maybe it appeals to the writer side of me. I can read it over and over and over but I fear I’ll never master it and my stories won’t hold up against any of the greats. I can try to develop a hero, but knowing the formula isn’t enough. Part of me is convince that the true secret is buried in the pages somewhere and it’s up to me to find it and decipher it.

What I love about The Hero with a 1000 Faces is that there are classical myths used to tell the stories. Ancient Greece and more contemporary Native American stories are used to illustrate the same points. It’s beautiful to think that over all that time, the same structure can be found in the stories about people whom we’re supposed to strive to be.

So yes, I love a lot of books and I highly recommend all the ones I talked about and more to you, but if you want to surprise yourself and enjoy a textbook then I recommend you learn to love The Hero with 1000 Faces as I’ve learned to do.