“I know you’re very busy, Mr. Harper. We’re all busy. But every person has a space next to where they sleep, whether a patch of pavement or a fine bedside table. In that space, at night, a book can glow. And in those moments of docile wakefulness, when we begin to let go of the day, then is the perfect time to pick up a book and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few minutes, a few pages, before we fall asleep.”

From the author of Life of Pi comes a literary correspondence — recommendations to Canada’s Prime Minister of great short books that will inspire and delight book lovers and book club readers across our nation.

Every two weeks since April 16th, 2007, Yann Martel has mailed Stephen Harper a book along with a letter. These insightful, provocative letters detailing what he hopes the Prime Minister may take from the books — by such writers as Jane Austen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Stephen Galloway — are collected here together. The one-sided correspondence (Mr. Harper’s office has only replied once) becomes a meditation on reading and writing and the necessity to allow ourselves to expand stillness in our lives, even if we’re not head of government.

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Visit the What Is Stephen Harper Reading blog.

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Introduction
 
Book 1: The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
Book 2: Animal Farm by George Orwell
Book 3: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Book 4: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart
Book 5: The Bhagavad Gita
Book 6: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Book 7: Candide by Voltaire
Book 8: Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems edited by Simon Armitage
Book 9: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
Book 10: Miss Julia by August Strindberg
Book 11: The Watsons by Jane Austen
Book 12: Maus by Art Spiegelman
Book 13: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Book 14: Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Book 15: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Book 16: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Book 17: The Island Means Minago by Milton Acorn
Book 18: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Books 19: The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren
Imagine a Day by Sarah L. Thomson and Rob Gonsalves
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg
Book 20: The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye
Book 21: The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Book 22: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Book 23: Artists and Models by Anaïs Nin
Book 24: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Book 25: The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi by Larry Tremblay
Book 26: Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Book 27: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Book 28: Read All About It! by Laura Bush and Jenna Bush
Book 29: Drown by Junot Díaz
Book 30: The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
Book 31: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Book 32: The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway
Book 33: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Book 34: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Book 35: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
Book 36: Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
Book 37: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
Book 38: Anthem by Ayn Rand
Book 39: Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Book 40: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Book 41: Gilgamesh in an English version by Stephen Mitchell
Book 42: Gilgamesh in an English version by Derrek Hines
Book 43: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
Book 44: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Book 45: Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Book 46: Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965–1999 by Paul McCartney
Book 47: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff
Book 48: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Book 49: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Book 50: Jane Austen: A Life by Carol Shields
Book 51: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Book 52: Burning Ice: Art & Climate Change a collaboration organized by David Buckland and the Cape Farewell Foundation
Book 53: Louis Riel by Chester Brown
Book 54: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Book 55: The Gift by Lewis Hyde
 
Permission Credits
List of Authors and Titles

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Yann Martel is the prize-winning author of the internationally acclaimed Life of Pi, which won the 2002 Booker Prize, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and Self, a novel. He lives in Saskatoon.

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