What was I like as a young reader? RAVENOUS. I'm so grateful to have been surrounded by family, librarians, booksellers, and educators who encouraged and enabled my appetite for reading from a very young age!

Todd

In a word - terrible!  Given struggles with slow language processing, I feasted on MAD magazine and Peanuts until my brain settled down. Little did I know that Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut were just around the corner!

It took me longer than all the other children to learn my letters. “How do you write a capital P?”, I remember asking in my remedial lessons. Then, everything changed. I’d get in trouble for reading in class. My teacher ruled I was only allowed to spend most lunch breaks in the library, not all of them. My brother started calling me the “reading rat.” I have no idea what sparked this literary 180 but I am grateful it happened.

Which one of these titles would you have chosen to read as a child?

In Halifax

On Tuesday, Oct 27th at 7 pm Ann will be in conversation with Louise Renault, co-host of CBC’s Information Morning, at the Spatz Theatre. Click here for tickets.

In Charlottetown

On Thursday, Oct 29th at 7 pm Ann will be in conversation with Mattea Roach, host of CBC’s popular radio show Bookends, at the Delta Prince Edward. Click here for tickets.

The Booksellers' List, Fall Edition

The Fall 2026 edition of The Booksellers’ List has arrived, featuring 20 highly anticipated new releases handpicked by indie booksellers across Canada. From new novels by beloved authors to thought-provoking nonfiction, there’s plenty here to keep your reading stack full all season long.  Whether you’re looking for a book to curl up with alongside the changing leaves, a hot new pick for your book club, or simply an excuse to spend an afternoon browsing your favourite indie, The Booksellers’ List has you covered.

Libro.fm Ebooks 

Our favourite indie audiobook company just announced they will be carrying ebooks in the new year! Yet another reason to switch.

Snail mail clubs

A new trend is being fueled by the desire to find more in the mailbox than bills along with a drive to stay off the phone and have experiences in real life. 

Voted on by 291 crime novelists, editors, booksellers, librarians and book lovers. See the top 50 (plus your favourite crime writers’ ballots!)

Hay Festival ‘Pleasure List’

The UK declared 2026 the Year of Reading to address a reduction in reading rates. The Hay Festival has been all in on the campaign. They asked thousands of readers in the UK and beyond to share their favourite reads - “the books they couldn’t put down, the books they’ve re-read the most times, the books that started it all for them.” Here are the top 39 books chosen by readers.

AI in the classroom

Just in time for back to school, read what Katherine Rundell, author and National Year of Reading ambassador, has to say about AI in the classroom. 

The third volume in her Impossible Creatures series is available now.   

For the discerning, stationery obsessed student, here are some recommendations for a successful school year.

I just finished Oliva Laing’s brilliant The Garden Against Time and for a breather am re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping. I read it forty years ago and loved it, but back then much of its substance was lost on me. Having read most, if not all of her oeuvre, I’m rediscovering this one and am blown away by its reflections on the repercussions of absence. I’m not a big re-reader, even of books I adore, but this is a novel I plan to re-read and re-read until parts of it are etched on my heart.

I may be slightly biased, author Stephens Gerard Malone is a friend, but his latest novel The Unnameable, released by Nimbus this spring, is the most powerful read I’ve encountered in a long, long while. In his riveting story about a young gay man coming of age on an Ottawa military base in the late 1960s and early 1970, a tumultuous time in Canada's history, Malone captures with great courage and precision the brutalities of an era couched in narrow attitudes about what is ’normal.’ Relatable to anyone who has ever felt marginalized, The Unnameable exposes the suffering inflicted by a world hell-bent on denying individuals the right to be who they are and the freedom to live accordingly. 

Reading books is like breathing! Books keep us company, they connect us with our inner selves and with others, they let us know we’re not alone. Reading books is the best antidote to doom, and other forms of scrolling and time-wasting. Reading books gives our days deeper meaning and value, teaching us about ourselves and those whose ideas, feelings and experiences are unlike our own. Reading books grows our hearts and minds, cultivates wisdom, nurtures our best selves and feeds our communion with the rest of humanity and creation. There simply is no substitute for reading books.

What was the first Readerity essay that you read? When did you decide that you wanted to write your own Readerity essay? Why do you think Readerity and its objectives are important?

I’m pretty sure it was Sheree Fitch’s A Child with A Book in a Tree, in which Sheree tells how her father instilled in her an early love of poetry, wordplay, and the joys of being steeped in the imagination. This reminded me of my father and my memories of him reading to me. If Sheree’s dad opened her door to poems, mine opened my door to stories. Dark, scary stories: Dad knew how to pick ’em. Even when I was as young as four. As soon as I read Sheree’s Readerity essay, I knew unequivocally what I’d write about if given the opportunity—lo and behold! For me, the lasting appeal and impact of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio will always be visceral , maybe because it was the first long form, non-picture book I experienced before I learned to read. It was the first time words left me so entirely in their thrall and at the mercy of my imagination.

Wrapped up in this, of course, is the great good fortune of growing up in a home where books and reading were vital. To nurture a love of books is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child. Especially in the digital age when so many things, life included, can feel weightless, dispensable, and depressingly superficial. Readerity’s purpose of revisiting, re-experiencing, and re-seeing the book most influential in our childhood threads together past and present in ways that uncover how and where our earliest ideas of the world and how we fit into it (or don’t) were first formed. It points to how these ideas, the basis of our values, have continued to shape our world views, our selves, our lives. Readerity helps unlock the mystery of personhood, and how life itself takes a shape, a form, and a direction, even and maybe especially when these feel shaky. Readerity is a compass: it’s an eye-opening means of looking back to where we started, to how we muddled through to get where we are, and of looking ahead to how we might navigate the future. This is why I love Readerity. This is why it’s so important. 

We know from your Readerity essay that L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables might very well have been your choice of a book from your youth to write about. Would you discuss briefly why you might have chosen Anne and what was the main aspect of Collodi's Pinocchio that was clearly what you wanted most to write about.

I’ve always adored Anne, from the time I knew I wanted to be a writer and was old enough not just to immerse myself in reading but to wonder what wanting to be a writer could mean. If I were to write a Readerity essay about the book that influenced me as a writer, yes, Anne would be it, for the myriad reasons so many other women writers, especially here in the Maritimes, revere the character and her author. My deep attachment to pretty much all of L.M. Montgomery’s books was fostered by my mom, my nana, and my aunts, all of whom found Anne a terrifically spunky example of How A Girl Should Be, especially a Maritime girl. Anne’s story is and was so very real to all of us, her PEI surroundings and milieu generationally familiar. 

But Readerity’s purpose, as I see it, is to go deeper and farther back into one’s reading past and to explore a book’s influence on one’s development first and foremost as a reader. Being a reader and becoming a writer are inseparable, but reading comes first. Hearing Collodi’s Pinocchio read aloud before I was literate predated my love of Anne by seven or eight years - eons in a child’s reading life. Moreover, reading Anne was kind of like a group read-in with all my closest female relations; I assumed (naively) the things they were picturing in their heads were just like the things I was picturing in mine. But with Pinocchio it was just Dad and me and his voice and those largely unillustrated pages, a story quite possibly verboten since we read it while Mom was at work. To little me, everything about Collodi’s story was strange and threatening, as dark and as unfamiliar as could be, and I know it grew cells in my imagination that have never gone away. Its scenes remain indelible, perhaps because, left mainly to its own devices, my imagination hosted their private screenings in my mind.

It was the strangeness of Collodi’s story, the dark, horrifying strangeness, that appealed to four-year-old me, and compelled me to return to it all these years later, at the expense of Anne. How could I turn my back on Pinocchio? Also, revisiting and writing about it was a way of reliving those times with my father, gone almost twenty years now. But that’s the thing about reading, writing, and remembering: no one ever really dies.


How did the rereading of your childhood Pinocchio for Readerity give you insight into the social and political times in which we now live?

Having had no inkling or understanding of anything remotely political when I was four, I had no idea, of course, when I chose to reread Pinocchio that the story would reflect so eerily on conditions now. Social injustice, the suffering of the poor and uneducated, the immorality of the greedy, the evils of a transactional world rife with grifters - the book has it all, as if tailored for readers in the times we find ourselves in. Who knew? I was shocked to find the stark parallels between Pinocchio’s world and ours, worlds where compassion and decency are in desperately short supply. My reading reminded me that the world has always been thus; there have always been tyrants and thieves and the uninformed whose oblivion enables them. And yet goodness and love endure, even when at times they feel like feeble flames in the darkness. The fact that Collodi wrote his story one hundred and forty-three years ago—before he could’ve imagined Hitler or Mussolini—points to the truth that things go in cycles, that one system eventually overthrows another, that empires and individuals wax and wane, that nothing stays the same. And in Collodi’s story, even the most blockheaded puppet eventually evolves into a human, at the core of whom is a beating, loving heart.

What surprised you most about the story when you reread  Pinocchio for the Readerity project?

After the shock of finding Collodi’s story so timely, I was astonished to discover its humour. Humour that no four year old, trust me, is equipped to get. Fuelled by dark undertones, Collodi’s inferences and allusions are subversive and often hilarious. Another aspect I found startling is how the story speaks on multiple levels, depending on readers’ degrees of innocence and experience. Its prose, at least in the translation I read, is lean and forthright, not a word or detail is superfluous. Collodi was a writer with a mission, and he took great liberties and flights of fancy to accomplish it. I was a bit taken aback at times by his plotting, evidence of the story’s inception as a serial, then surprised and delighted by how little Collodi seemed to worry about straining (or blowing up) his readers’ willing suspension of disbelief. In the end, we believe everything he tells us, because his message, that we are nothing without selfless lov, is truer than true.