The Literary Review of Canada

In 1879, journalist and literary critic Walter Bagehot wrote “superficial the reading of grown men in some sort must ever be; it is only once in a lifetime that we can know the passionate reading of youth.” His words neatly sum up the inspiration for this special holiday feature, in which ten LRC contributors reminisce about those books that not only sparked youthful passion but also somehow shaped the person they have become, whether morally, intellectually, politically or creatively. We invited them to describe any work they encountered before the age of about 16—be it an adult or juvenile, contemporary or classic, fiction or non-fiction book—so long as it helped them find the road to adulthood.

The Little Mermaid

Hans Christian Andersen

I may have been nine or ten years old when I read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, perhaps even younger, and I can still see three of the book’s magnificent illustrations in my mind: the mermaid visiting the witch’s den at the bottom of the sea, the sight of her on the shore watching the prince dance on his ship and her mermaid sisters calling to her from the foamy surface of the water when it was time for her to die.

What the little mermaid wanted—the love of a human man—is not central to my memory; rather, it was her courage in choosing an independent life in spite of being warned about the dangers of failure. There was no Walt Disney in this telling; I remember accepting the sad fact of her death because she had understood and accepted this possibility from the start. She conveyed the first glimmering that a life of my own making was possible, and I have never forgotten her.

—Erna Paris

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Victor Hugo

I grew up in the wilds of sub-Arctic Canada speaking only Cree and Chipewyan. To this day there are no bookstores or libraries up there in caribou country: our books were the sounds of nature at its most unsullied, and we devoured with an enthusiasm bordering on gluttony an “oral literature” jam-packed with hair-raising adventures and fabulous beings, from the Weetigo (Windigo in Ojibway) to that magically constructed clown, the Trickster, the being who created the Cree language from thin air and, in so doing, made it the funniest language on Earth.

We therefore didn’t read, strictly speaking, until we were sent off to boarding school, and I still remember reading, and understanding, my first words in English. What I culled from my grade one reader with immense pain and difficulty that first year was “See Spot run. See David come.”

But when I was 14, the old French missionary posted in Brochet, Manitoba (my home “rez”), gave me a tattered paperback: an English translation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. I couldn’t stop reading. Night after night, until five or six a.m., I struggled through that book by lamplight. And when we ran out of kerosene, I would read under a single candle.

Beyond historical and cultural interest, I guess it was the sheer power of the narrative that riveted me, the way it drew you irresistibly from event to event to event, left you fascinated to know where characters like Esmeralda, Quasimodo, and even the strange monk Frollo—characters so unique and arresting—had come from. The life stories they revealed astonished you, touched you, moved you to the core, made you cry.

By age 16, though, I was wearing glasses: that damned book ruined my eyesight!

—Tomson Highway

The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot

For me, it was The Waste Land. This was the book that jolted my teenage reading, and teenage mind. T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, pushed to birth by his fellow magus Ezra Pound, had a power to it. The language was spare and allusive, beckoning to a land of further learning, far beyond the shores of my Ontario high school.

There were, of course, the fusty bits. Who could really care about Madame Sosostris and her cards, even if Eliot did give a temporary boost to the tarot industry?

But there was also that bridge and the dead flowing over it. “So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.” I did not appreciate then what I know now: how the dead of World War I haunted the poem, and gave it a peculiar smell of rotting civilization.

We read Eliot in one of those blessed moments in high school, where an inspiring teacher spent time waiting for inspiration to sink in. We formed an Eliot club after school, boys and girls sharing a secret and wanting to believe we were a little elite. It was, yes, intoxicating. I’ve never forgotten.

—Wesley Wark

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Truman Capote

Capote was to say that “the real progenitor” of this book, written when he was 23, “was my difficult, subterranean self,” and that it set him free.

This was the book that set me free as well, allowing me to enter other rooms, hear other voices than those that were held up as the models for right conduct in my colonial Jamaican world. Although I was a voracious reader and enjoyed “English literature,” I certainly did not see myself, nor indeed hear myself or those around me, in the works that I read. Other Voices, Other Rooms is the story of a young boy’s coming of age in rural Alabama. When I read it in my mid teens, I was swept into a world I had not before encountered in literature, a world very like the one I inhabited, in terms of both my own difficult, subterranean self and the one above ground, for the psychic and physical landscape of the American South seemed very familiar. The characters I knew well, for they were all around me, themselves searching in wayward and uncompromising ways for the means to tell their stories. I opened this book and glimpsed my own subjects, heard our own voices.

—Olive Senior

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas Hofstadter

I was a high school math geek. This is a part of my past I’ve kept hidden from my artistic colleagues for professional convenience. Now the truth is out: I was a full-blown mathie.

Like all bona fide mathies in the early 1980s, I had memorized at least one Monty Python record, could quote the oeuvre of Douglas Adams and had a near-religious experience reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Hofstadter’s book examined the works of mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist Maurits Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, delving into these three extraordinary minds to unlock the inherent interconnectedness of art and science. To Hofstadter, the human imagination is what defines and creates existence. Whether we create fugues, lithographs or theories to describe natural phenomena, he argues, we are all attempting to answer the same question: “What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?”

While recently rereading Gödel, Escher, Bach, it struck me that my decision 15 years ago to leave an engineering career behind to pursue a life in the theatre was not the seismic shift I initially imagined it to be. Instead, I was merely following a turn in an eternal golden braid.

—Jovanni Sy

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy

I grew up on a farm in Manitoba. There was not a library for miles around. When I was 13 or 14, somebody told me about the University Extension Library. Soon afterward, my first package arrived at the post office in Altona, containing Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. From the green opening to the gigantic stone ending, Hardy’s world was both familiar and strange—unheimlich. The battle between youthful lust and spiritual longing was my conflict writ large and Hardy’s antiquated language stirred me to the core. It was not that he answered my questions; it was that he refused to answer or evade them. What got me was the potent mixture of irony and fierce honesty. I reserved my strongest moral outrage for Angel Clare. For his high-minded stupidity and for his betrayal of Tess, I hated him with a passion. Poor, inarticulate Tess. Like me, she was a peasant. I knew her doom was inevitable and wept at her death. That did nothing to soften my fury at her for letting this disaster happen to her. Tess was a horror story for me and my reading was charged with what Frye has called the “energy of repudiation.”

—Magdalene Redekop

Men Against the Sea

Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

C’mon. Action, adventure, that’s where it’s at for a young boy. None of this prissy psychological stuff. I turned 16 in 1959, in the heat of the Cold War. We knew right from wrong. The high school cadet battalion was prepared to march. John Le Carré was still out in the cold. I read Victory Pass by Burgess Leonard, The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams and my favourite might have been Men Against the Sea by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. That was all about the fate of Captain Bligh and his few loyal crew after the famous mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty in that year of moment, 1789. Countering savage elements, human and natural, with sheer pluck, the captain took his small open boat across the Pacific to safety. “His name will be revered by those who accompanied him for as long as they may live,” wrote the ship’s doctor. Now that’s literature for a boy! Did it shape me? All that leadership bumf, thrown at us from all directions, must have had its effect—largely negative, I suspect, given what happened in the following decade. I now wish I’d played the piano more.

—Modris Eksteins

Snakes of the World

Raymond L. Ditmars

My favourite book was Snakes of the World by Raymond L. Ditmars. Through those pages with their grainy photographs, I entered a secret world. Growing up in Florida I was fascinated by snakes. I hunted them in the Everglades and brought them home in burlap bags. Unusual specimens, to my mother’s horror, I hid in the guest bathroom where they basked on the tiles or coiled about the base of the toilet. Ditmars was the leading herpetologist of the day. I spotted his masterpiece in a bookshop window, the dust-jacket adorned with a king cobra’s profile against an orange background. The book cost $3.49 and I scrounged every penny. I loved the precise yet mysterious terminology—elapid, crotalid, colubrine—as well as the exact descriptions. Ditmars taught me to sharpen my eyes, to find the right words for what I saw. In leafing through it again, I noticed crinkled pages and remembered that when I first opened it, my little brother leaned over while eating a plum and doused the pages. What infuriated me then moves me now. I cherish the book for what it taught me but I love it for the moment it brings back.

—Eric Ormsby

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum

Of all the book series for children, nothing caught my imagination as thoroughly as the Oz books—not only L. Frank Baum’s original, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but the follow-up chronicles, by Baum and others, of the land of Oz. I read the books before I saw the great movie. Like most North American children in the 20th century I came to know the stories of Oz as well as I knew biblical stories (Dorothy and her whole family, by the way, leave Kansas and live in Oz). Thanks particularly to the movie, the Oz fairy tale is now probably more imbedded in our popular culture than the old bible stories, and has become a more essential part of our common cultural language. You aren’t literate if you don’t know your Wizard of Oz.

In my view this is entirely good, because no one will ever take up his sword in the name of the Wizard of Oz. The glory of the story, and the great impact it had on me, lies in its revelation that authority—the Great Oz himself—is mostly fraudulent. Omnipotent political gods in their Emerald Cities? All humbugs! Wicked!

—Michael Bliss

Hiroshima

John Hersey

When I was a kid—9, 10, 11—I was a great fan of the Hardy Boys, Brian Mcfarlane’s hockey books (and anything about the Montreal Canadiens), abridged versions of the classics, stories about space travel and the Junior Pears Encyclopedia, not to mention Superman and Spiderman commicks—essentially anything about sports, mystery, superheroes or adventure. One Christmas, as a dare more than anything, I asked for all the Hardy Boys books. My parents called my bluff, giving me all 38 then in print. I seem to remember they were published by Dutton and cost $1.25 a piece, not a trifling amount in the 1950s.

It may have been the next Christmas, when I was 12 or 13, that my father said, “We thought we’d try something different” as I unwrapped John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a reprint of his famous 1946 full-issue New Yorker article about the atomic bombing. What most impressed my pre-adolescent imagination were descriptions of people’s skin falling off, but it was my first serious book on a serious subject and it had its effect.

A year or two later my father gave me Ted Sorensen’s Kennedy, which sparked a lifelong interest in politics and public affairs. In the early 1990s, after I’d met Sorensen at a dinner party in New York, my father was as thrilled to hear about it as I was to tell it.

For 40 more years, until his death two years ago, this best-read insurance clerk in Canada pushed my reading this way and that with books he thought would challenge me. When I miss him most, I go to my bookshelves and he is there.

—William Watson