Do you have a favourite work of fiction?

Tachyon

In any format?  Across all formats?  And if so, what is it, and why?

Is it possible for you to give a single answer to this question?  If so, is it an easy question, or a hard one?

What do you think?  Just curious what people think on this.

Corvina

Not across all formats. But in the format of anime (the first that came to mind), it's Legend of the Galactic Heroes

Klinotaxis

no

sometimes i like things a lot but i don't tend to reread books and so on that much, so it feels weird to say it's my favorite

like, i'd say middlemarch was my favorite novel, but i read it once and don't remember a lot of details any more

Odradek

Grendel

glennmagusharvey

I think different media are too different to be truly comparable.  Even within a medium it is difficult to name a single work that is my favorite, because of the diversity of genres and other features.

I've certainly had to come up with some answers to these questions before, while filling up little questionnaire-type things on places like Facebook, or when chatting with fellow appreciators of a given medium.  I have learned to not bother anymore with these, but I still have sets of boilerplate answers that I can provide when asked.  But they're more boilerplate than something I genuinely actively maintain, because it's only really possible to gauge my enjoyment of a work many moons after I've finished experiencing it, after a period of mentally processing it and coming to an understanding of what it means to myself.  It's really not right for me to give a rating on something immediately after finishing it -- even if I take that rating to be solely a measure of personal enjoyment, which I do.

Incidentally, it's also not fun to keep asking myself whether I like something already because it's supposed to be really good and/or critically/popularly acclaimed, or whether I hate something already because it's supposed to be really bad and/or critically/popularly panned.  I think I ran into some of that problem while watching Madoka Magica and I'm still running into it now that I'm watching Guilty Crown.

Obā-san

probably

Imipolex G

Gravity's Rainbow, probably

just because I can turn to any page and find inspiration to live and write

eriophora zia

Because I always find it so hard to pick favorite pieces of media, I normally phrase questions like in a less... pressurizing way. e.g., "What are five books you really enjoyed?"

Tre

I don't think I have any particular favorite thing in one medium that transcends all others, though I do have those few things that take over my mind entirely if left unchecked, which more often than not are either cartoons or video games (you already know which ones).

If there was any one body of work that's influenced the person I've become and my identity, though, it'd probably be Scott Pilgrim in its comic and film forms. I can legit say that I am a better person for having enjoyed it; among other things, it helped me see romantic orientations besides 'straight' as being completely normal things to have and relieved some of the fears I had about growing up and not knowing who I wanted to be entirely yet.

All that with kung fu, so, yeah, perfect.

Bee

The Phantom Tollbooth.  It was the first novel I ever read, and has a special place in my heart :)

Sredni Vashtar

No single example, but I can think of several examples across multiple media.

Tachyon

Please, feel free to elaborate.

i was curious about whether people *could* give a single answer to this question, but it's fine if you can't.  Part of the reason i asked was because i wasn't sure i could and i wanted to see what other people thought.

But multiple favourites/favourite-within-a-specific-medium are also cool.

Sredni Vashtar

In terms of prose, Ligotti's first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and Gene Wolfe's first novel, Peace, strike me as two works of fiction that I will never shake, although if asked to name single stories I could name so many more: "The White People", "At the Bureau", "The Red Tower", "King Dragon", "Take Me When You Go", and so forth. I haven't been reading or writing a whole lot lately, but prose is possibly my favourite medium after music in that it is so simple, pure and direct. You must construct the images, sounds, scents, tastes and textures yourself. Only ideas of senses are proffered, and from them you must make the world.

Filmed media is more complicated, I suppose, because there are so many factors that can go right or wrong, particularly with animation, which I happen to be inordinately fond of. I will have to think on it a little bit.