Everybody's Favourites: Canadians Talk About Books That Changed Their Lives

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Have you ever wondered which childhood book most influenced your
favourite Canadian celebrity, or if there’s a link between what you
read and what you become? You may find the answers in this collection of
personal reflections on early reading by some of Canada’s most famous
people. Children’s book reviewer and columnist Arlene Perly Rae asked
scores of Canadian writers, politicians, academics, artists, scientists,
athletes, dancers, businesspeople, and broadcasters to “think of a
special book read as a child or teenager, that woke them up, stirred
their soul or changed their life.”

Some of the answers that came back may surprise the reader. Allan
Blakeney, former premier of Saskatchewan, began a lifelong addiction to
poetry while hitchhiking around Canada with a pocketbook of verse.
Singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie was most influenced by Beatrix
Potter’s Peter Rabbit. Fiction writer Timothy Findley remembers nature
books as his favourite childhood reading, while Nobel prize–winning
chemist John Polanyi recalls being drawn irresistibly to a Winston
Churchill autobiography. Newspaper columnist Richard Gwyn, who lived in
war-ravaged China in the 1930s, found his childhood anxieties about
being left behind mirrored in a picture book about a little duck named
Ping who became separated from his family because he was naughty.

To help the reader understand the context in which these books were
written, Rae classifies her celebrities’ responses according to genre.
The categories include Adventure Stories, Classics, Books about Nature,
Poetry, Popular Reading (mostly trash), and Sports. Rae prefaces each of
the chapters with a discussion of the genre from both a general and a
Canadian point of view. She traces the evolution of children’s
literature from its earliest stirrings to its current status as a
multimillion-dollar industry. Everybody’s Favourites concludes with an
appendix of book lists; these include a chronology of important
children’s books dating from before 1800 and various lists of current
award-winning children’s books.

This is an important book for anyone interested in books for Canadian
children.