FFWD Weekly
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| BOOKS All book reviewers have a tendency to keep this question in reserve when newly introduced: "What is your favorite book?" Literacy campaigner and reviewer Arlene Perly Rae asked a large number of well-known Canadians a similar question: "What special book you read as a child or teenager... stirred your soul or changed your life?" Everybody's Favourites (Viking) is a compilation of the 150 replies. What single book most influenced Rae as a child? "My favorite early book, Ferdinand the Bull, was soon eclipsed by Charlotte's Web, which made me cry. I am adamant that anyone who does not like Charlotte's Web is beyond redemption! The Secret Garden then became important." Three favorites? Could it be significant that the anthology editor has three daughters? "Of my daughters, Lisa was, and is, a Winnie the Pooh fanatic, Eleanor leans toward Nancy Drew, and Judith is steadfast in support of Canadian Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables." It is not the actual choices in Rea's collection but the articulation of these choices that gives the anthology its appeal. "Someone who is not looking for a juvenile book recommendation list can enjoy the reminiscences of public figures," Rea explains. Peter Kent tells of his school days in Alberta and how his news career was influenced by a biography of Sir Douglas Bader, the legless RAF wing-commander (of mainly Canadian and Polish pilots) in World War II. Canada's foremost iconographer, realist painter Ken Danby, acknowledges a debt to the illustrator of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, N.C. Wyeth, and his son, Andrew. The book launched the Canadian artist on a career during which he has recorded some of this country's most vivid images, becoming the peer of those he admired. Don Harron sites cartoon books as influencing him into a 60-year career of "doing caricatures with my voice." Richard Ouzounian, the theatre aficionado, describes a mystical life journey that began when reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. Brian Mulroney confesses that when he read aloud to his sisters, "Olive feigned interest and Peg fell asleep - a hazard I was later to encounter at various stages of my political career." Ralph Klein makes the understandable choice of Leon Uris as his favorite author. Rae, whose husband is the former NDP premier of Ontario, expresses no surprise that those who do not share her political philosophy responded so enthusiastically. "Premiers' conferences are a place to build friendships." Some of the contributors have given very intimate reasons for their choices. As a result, the personalities talking on the page become more familiar, more human, and Rae becomes a sort of Mother Confessor. The book is a place to dip into, sporadically, and share a mutual joy with famous Canadians - the love of reading. Perhaps the last word on such favorite books, appropriately, should not belong to Rae but to one of the featured voices - Alex Tilley: "Oh God, why do the Bobbsey Twins keep springing to mind!?" |