Q: "What is a classic book?"

Writer Italo Calvino had fourteen answers to what makes a book a classic. These are my favourites:

• The classics are books that exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual's ... unconscious.
• A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
• Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
• A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe...
• 'Your' classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.

What are some of your classics? (Regular readers will already know many of mine!]

[Hat tip Alberto Mingardi writing about one of his (and my) classics, Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress]

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