Books that changed our lives For I Love to Read Month, Arts & Life staff weigh in on the works that shaped their childhoods, and recommended reads today By: Ben Waldman, Eva Wasney, Jen Zoratti, Ben Sigurdson and Jill Wilson Posted: 5:11 PM CST Monday, Feb. 10, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/02/2025 (602 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

February is I Love to Read Month in Manitoba, an annual occasion to encourage reading, writing and sharing in the joy of literacy.

This week, Thin Air Kids, a four-day celebration of books presented by Plume Winnipeg, features events for everyone from toddlers to teens, including:

• a visit and reading with Hetxw’ms Gyetxw (Brett Huson), writer of the Mothers of Xsan series, at Harvey Smith Library on Thursday at 10:30 a.m.;
• a graphic novel workshop, Finding Closure with Jen Storm and Alice RL, at Millennium Library at 2 p.m. Saturday (ages 12-18); and
• An Evening with Mark Morton, author of dystopian novel The Headmasters, at Raven’s End Bookstore at 7 p.m. Saturday (age 15+).

For more information, see thinairwinnipeg.ca.

Unsurprisingly, as people who write for a living, the members of the Free Press arts team are pretty passionate about reading too. Here are five of their favourite kids books, as well as five they’re loving now.

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■ Book I loved as a child:

Growing up, I adored all of Roald Dahl’s children’s books. We owned the Puffin paperbacks, with their distinctive Quentin Blake illustrations, and I re-read them all many, many times, obviously enjoying the way evil adults were always bested by smart and decent kids.

But the one I probably love best features a vulpine protagonist, not a child. Fantastic Mr. Fox is about a clever creature who outfoxes three vile farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean, secretly tunnelling into their chicken houses and cidery while they wait fruitlessly outside his warren to shoot him.

Nobody does villains like Dahl (the three Bs are truly disgusting) and the real sense of danger — they actually shoot his tail off — makes his triumph all the sweeter, as he and his family (he’s a great dad) host a grand feast for the Badger, Mole, Rabbit and Weasel families.

 

■ Book I currently recommend to everyone:

Normally, when I see the words “formally inventive,” my eyes glaze over, but Jamie Quatro’s Two-Step Devil is too dazzling, too visceral, too funny to ever be classified as pretentious.

The American author, who was raised an evangelical Christian, brings that background to bear on the story of a dying man with ecstatic visions who calls himself the Prophet and who tries to rescue a teenage girl from prostitution and drug addiction. Told from different characters’ points of view (including the devil of the title) it’s beautiful and harrowing and quite unlike anything I’ve read before.

— Jill Wilson

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■ Book I loved as a child:

Like most girls who grew up to become writers themselves, I read and re-read the adventures of Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables), Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House series) and Harriet M. Welsch (Harriet the Spy). Smart, acerbic New Yorker Harriet, in particular, looms large in my literary life; I have a framed first-edition cover of Harriet the Spy hanging in my dining room.

But I want to use this space to shout out a book that I loved deeply as a kid: A Handful of Time, the 1987 novel by Canadian author Kit Pearson.

Twelve-year-old Patricia is forced to spend the summer with her aunt and cousins at the lake in Alberta while her parents deal with their separation. Patricia is miserable, and her cousins torment her. Then she discovers a pocket watch that, when wound, allows her to travel back to when her own mother was 12.

It’s a poignant look at complicated mother-daughter relationships and that fraught time of life when you’re not a kid anymore, but you’re not grown up, either.

 

■ Book I currently recommend to everyone:

Let’s stick with the time travel theme. This Time Tomorrow, the 2022 novel by New York author Emma Straub, is like a grown-up A Handful of Time, another book that uses the past to make sense of the present.

On the morning after her 40th birthday, Alice wakes up in her childhood bedroom — and it’s 1996. For 24 hours, it’s her 16th birthday again — and her beloved father is young again, too. Steeped in ‘90s nostalgia, This Time Tomorrow is a beautiful rumination on life’s many losses and another fraught time of life: middle age.

— Jen Zoratti

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■ Book I loved as a child:

I can’t remember how I first encountered J.D. Salinger’s writing, or which of his books I first read, but it was definitely at an impressionable (and maybe too young) age — the wry, dry humour of his poignant prose quickly and permanently embedded itself in my psyche.

I could pick any of his books, but let’s go with Franny and Zooey. Published in 1961, the book contains a short story and novella that follows the titular youngest siblings of Salinger’s fictional Glass family. We first encounter Franny, visiting her college boyfriend over the weekend and feeling disillusioned with, well, everyone. The longer second section of the book sees Franny back at the Glass family’s New York apartment, having suffered a breakdown, and the ways her brother Zooey clumsily tries to help.

There’s all manner of Zen/philosophical musings in Franny and Zooey that I didn’t fully pick up on until re-reading Salinger’s work as an adult. I think what initially struck me (and still does) was the way Salinger could write dialogue — it totally knocked my socks off.

 

■ Book I currently recommend to everyone:

Looks like I have a theme as well — troubled siblings. Miriam Toews’ 2014 novel All My Puny Sorrows is the heart-wrenching story of two sisters, Elf and Yolandi, the former a renowned concert pianist suffering with severe depression and the latter a floundering writer.

The novel draws on the Manitoba-born author’s own experiences with her late sister Marjorie, who died by suicide in 2010. Like Salinger, Toews manages to imbue difficult emotional subject matter with quiet levity and humour, and (also like Salinger) the dialogue in her fiction is impeccable.

— Ben Sigurdson

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■ Book I loved as a child:

I wasn’t an enormous reader growing up. Am I allowed to say that, folks? But Gordon Korman seemed determined to change my mind with his Island trilogy, a stranded story that I’d gladly submit as a personal desert-island read. Beginning with Shipwreck and continuing with Survival and then finally Escape, I remember being completely committed to Korman’s characters, putting myself in their position and imagining how I would handle their isolation on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. It certainly gave me more motivation to stay afloat during my lessons at the Centennial Pool.

Korman, a Toronto-raised, Long Island-based author, has written more than 80 books in his career, which began when a track and field coach teaching freshman English gave his students the liberty of freestyle self-education. Beginning in February, Korman spent one period per day writing This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, which was published by Scholastic when he was 15.

Amazing what can happen when kids are given the chance to create.

 

■ Book I currently recommend to everyone:

I’ve never recommended anything to everyone, but to anyone paying attention to the horrors of the moment —the rise of fascism, the fall of humanism, the brutal wildfires and those gleefully stoking them — I recommend taking a bite of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.

It’s a painfully funny book, punctuated by the author’s stick-and-poke illustrations and the regular Vonnegut surrogate Kilgore Trout’s intermittent diversions into his own, all-too-brief science fiction sagas, including The Dancing Fool, about an alien who knows the cure to cancer and the key to avoiding war, but can only speak in a language consisting of farts and tap-dance routines. “Like so many Trout stories,” writes Vonnegut, “it was about a tragic failure to communicate.”

— Ben Waldman

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■ Book I loved as a child:

As a certified Horse Girl, many of my preferred childhood books were about my favourite animal — Black Beauty, The Black Stallion, National Velvet, Misty of Chincoteague, The Horse Whisperer, King of the Wind. If there was a horse on the cover, it was on my bookshelf next to an absurd number of horse figurines and equine-related trinkets.

The Saddle Club, however, was my ultimate obsession. There are a whopping 94 titles in the series by American author Bonnie Bryant, which follows the horseback adventures of best friends Carole Hanson, Lisa Atwood and Stevie Lake (I named my childhood cat after Stevie’s horse, Belle) in the idyllic setting of Pine Hollow Stables.

The books allowed me to live out my horse-ownership dreams, while depicting relatable — at the time — nuances of female friendship.

■ Book I currently recommend to everyone:

I’ve had a strained relationship with reading in adulthood. University English assignments turned the pastime into a chore and a word-centric career in journalism often made cracking open a book feel like an extension of my workday.

I’m happy to report things have shifted in recent years thanks to another special interest: food.

While modern recipe bloggers have diluted the genre of food storytelling, well-written memoirs rooted in food offer a multi-sensory reading experience. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is a beautiful, heartbreaking example of this.

In her 2021 memoir, Zauner — a musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast — reflects on the complicated relationship with her dying mother through the lens of Korean food. You can taste her descriptions of soy-sauce eggs and sour kimchi, and you can better understand her personal experience of love and identity through the universal language of eating and cooking.

— Eva Wasney