Stress relief, apocalypse lead reads at the library Local writers stake claim to top-requested list By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 4:35 PM CST Monday, Feb. 24, 2025

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This article was published 24/02/2025 (318 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They say that a political earthquake shakes even the smallest villages.

And if Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election to the U.S. presidency and first month in office is that earthquake, its tremors seem to be felt in places as remote as Winnipeg’s libraries.

“Most recently, what I noticed are books about the end of the world,” says Carolyn Minor, a collections librarian at the Winnipeg Public Library, about library users’ reading habits.

“Most recently, what I noticed are books about the end of the world… I must have ordered eight in the last four weeks.”–Carolyn Minor

“I must have ordered eight in the last four weeks.”

Minor, who concentrates on non-fiction orders, is referring to books about the climate crisis and perceived collapse in the world order.

Titles include A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips, Unredacted: Russia, Trump and the Fight for Democracy by Christopher Steele and Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet by Kate Marvel.

The pattern is perhaps reminiscent of a trend eight years ago, when dystopian classics such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four — briefly a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon in 2017 — started flying off the shelves after Trump’s 2016 election.

But in other ways reading habits feel a little more sanguine this time around.

“Look at the holds list,” says Minor. “That’s like your most recent snapshot of what people are (reading).”

The Winnipeg Public Library keeps several records tracking its most popular books. The top-holds list represents not always the most circulated books, but the ones for which demand outstrips supply until the library can order more copies.

At the top of this list is The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions Can’t Stop Talking About — an uppercase-heavy self-helper by Mel Robbins that urges us to deal with others’ bad behaviour and unco-operativeness via a simple mantra: Let them!

The author and former CNN legal analyst recommended the technique to deal with stress on the U.S. election day in November.

Her book debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list a couple of weeks ago and is the top-selling non-fiction hardcover at Winnipeg’s McNally Robinson Booksellers.

One of the top political non-fiction books on the WPL’s hold list is former CBC journalist Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage, which explores how healthy public debate breaks down when we lose a shared political understanding of the big ideas like “freedom” and “democracy.”

Notably absent from both McNally’s bestsellers and the WPL’s top holds list are the sort of American liberal self-help and #Resistance manuals that peppered bestseller lists in 2017: Think books by leading liberal lights with titles like On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century; Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency; A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism; and Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

The top 10 books on both Amazon and New York Times’ bestseller lists, as of Feb. 24, show a similar absence of baldly anti-Trump and #Resistance style works (though On Tyranny, Timothy Snider’s 2017 guide for battling America’s turn towards authoritarianism, is back on the list if you factor in e-books).

There may be some lag as liberals take stock of Trump’s first few months in office and wage battle in longer form than NYT and Washington Post op-eds.

But it could also be that progressive readers are a little weary of this genre. Maybe some are even practising Robbins’ lesson of radical acceptance — saying “let them” as Trump’s team fires off executive orders (70 in his first month) at an almost unprecedented pace.

In the case of Winnipeg readers, the relative absence of books on American politics likely has something to do with stronger regional interests. Minor highlights the number of books by local Indigenous authors within the top 50 titles of WPL’s holds list.

For instance, there’s Murray Sinclair’s 2024 Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation, published a few months before the venerated First Nations lawyer and senator died.

An oral history of a life that intersected with some of the most important events in recent Canadian history — including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he chaired — the work is a deeply personal memoir and, inevitably, a profound meditation on the future of reconciliation.

There’s also Wînipêk: Visions of Canada From an Indigenous Centre by Niigaan Sinclair, Murray Sinclair’s son. A collection of essays by one of the country’s most resonant thinkers — many based on his columns for the Free Press — Wînipêk explores our city’s official and subterranean histories, its rivers, monuments, schools and landfills, to make a case for Winnipeg as “ground zero” for reconciliation.

Both books by the Sinclairs are also currently on McNally’s bestseller list.

Also notable on the WPL’s hold list is Winnipegger katherena vermette’s novel Real Ones, about two Métis sisters who must pick up the pieces after their estranged mother, the toast of the Canadian art world for her Indigenous-style work, is called out as a “pretendian.”

Absent from WPL’s top circulated and hold lists are works by Jordan Peterson, including his new book We Who Wrestle With God.

“I don’t know how to explain that to you. I’ve wondered about that myself,” Minor says.

The matter seems mysterious because Peterson, who just lectured in Winnipeg for several thousand people, is arguably Canada’s most impactful conservative intellectual and influencer.

It seems his fans would rather hear him passionately sermonize about his contempt for Justin Trudeau and “woke culture” online or onstage than parse this densely worded theological doorstopper.

Canada’s impending federal election may not come as an earthquake, though it promises to be a momentous one for our increasingly polarized country.

It will be interesting to see how it reverberates in our local libraries and bookstores, an imperfect measure of the public mood that has the advantage of reminding us of new titles to check out.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca