Such a good campfire question!

The litigious part of me wants to say that the one book limit should really be a size and weight limit (no, I’m not a lawyer). That way, those of us who like short books aren’t handicapped. In fact, we can choose two or three good books to that one huge novel that someone else recommends (a big book, someone once said, is a big misfortune).

But that’s a quibble. The important criterion ought to run along these lines:
“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare’s sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? …If you find that the reader of popular romance—however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances—goes back to his old favorites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry. The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which come only once) but for a certain surprisingness.”

So, I guess I’m saying you should take along whatever book you have read many times and continue to enjoy. Bugging out is no doubt an unhappy experience filled with all kinds of novelties, mostly undesirable. That being the case, the B.O.B. book should be an old friend.

As for me, I like children’s stories and make no apology. When I go on business travel (something I truly can’t stand, especially the airport part), I take along some children’s books I have read over and over. My favorite is the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Other old classics I’ve recently re-read include My Side of the Mountain, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, some short stories by Oscar Wilde (The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince), King of the Golden River, The Golden Key, and so on.

I can’t argue with the man who recommended Lord of the Rings, though. The British didn’t vote that the best book of the 20th century for nothing.