Ten Books Everyone Should Read

Post-Fear Street and pre-Paradise Lost, this anthology allows readers to hold onto their childhoods a little longer.

One day in 1989, my dad gave me a book, Growing Up Canadian, acquired secondhand from a friend’s son. I’ve had the book since I was growing up Canadian. I have it here in front of me. The anthology, compiled for students at Upper Canada College, contains, among other stories, “The Bottle Queen” (W.P. Kinsella), “A Bird in the House” (Margaret Laurence), “An Ounce of Cure” (Alice Munro), “The Hockey Sweater” (Roch Carrier), “A Cap for Steve” (Morley Callaghan), “Penny in the Dust” (Ernest Buckler), and “The Last Husky” (Farley Mowat). I just Googled it, and according to the internet, it doesn’t exist.

When I was a kid, I was a reader. I knew what went down on Fear Street, the eye colour and dress size of the Sweet Valley twins, the names of the alternates in the Baby-Sitters Club. But I could appreciate that the stories in Growing Up Canadian were something new. They marked the point when I graduated from those other books, sensing then what I can articulate now – that although the protagonists were youths, the writing was literary fiction. I had heard the name Alice Munro, knew my dad read reviews of her in the Toronto Star. My dad reads book reviews but he doesn’t read books, and I felt that I’d one-upped him.

In “Penny in the Dust,” a boy’s father gives him a penny, and the boy buries it in the dust and loses it. When confronted by his father, the boy thinks, How could I bear the shame of repeating before him the soft twisting visions I had built in my head in the magic August afternoon when almost anything could be made to seem real, as I buried the penny and dug it up again? How could I explain that pit-of-the-stomach sickness which struck through the whole day when I had to believe, at last, that it was really lost? When I read that story, I was shocked that I wasn’t the only kid who’d spent an afternoon burying pennies in sand. But more crucially, those were my visions, that was my pit-of-the-stomach; I easily believed that a penny could merit such anguish.

I recommended “The Bottle Queen” to my fiction MFA classmates. We laughed at the book’s cover – a sketch of seven Canadian teenagers, appropriately diverse, grinning open-mouthed over an open book as though nothing had ever given them such joy. But when I discussed the part of the story when Delores Ermineskin, a.k.a. the Bottle Queen, takes every dollar bill she has earned from selling discarded empty bottles tossed in ditches, bills she’s saving to buy a gorgeous dance costume – she’s a dancer – and gives them to her unreliable, drinking father, and her brother, the narrator, says, “If being loved could make you a better person, then Pa would be about equal to an angel,” I felt, quite embarrassedly, that I might cry.

Growing Up Canadian was the ideal transition book, allowing me, before I read Prufrock or Paradise Lost, to hold on a little longer to childhood and consequently to the childhood love of reading. It was one book, perhaps of many, that made me see literature as something quite relevant to my life. Growing Up Canadian expanded my small outlook; it taught me that other families weren’t all like my family, that South Indians weren’t the only Indians, that Ontario wasn’t the only province, that not everybody lived in a house like mine. It encapsulated and humanized the national landscape, and it instilled in me, a fiction writer, the simple belief that the best kinds of fiction are the kinds that can still make you tearful, years after their inception.