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Recently in a webinar, Heather Plett of The Centre for Holding Space suggested that while we’re used to trigger warnings about trauma we’ve experienced, we should become alert to the things that return happy memories too.  “Find your joy triggers,” she said.

I started a list of such things and the first item—suddenly so obvious as I looked around my living room—was “the books on my bookshelves.” There they were along the wall in front of me, one joy trigger after another! 

When I say they tug me back to joy, I don’t mean they are happy books necessarily, but that they were a pleasure to read and that what they recall is some amalgam of content, skilled or beautiful writing, the context of my reading, a lasting insight perhaps, or even the feel of the book as object. 

I realized too, as I considered this array of good triggers, how often the reading of books appears in both my fiction and nonfiction. In my latest nonfiction book, Return Stroke: essays & memoir, for example, reading slides in like a balm during healing from childbirth, like assistance in the exploration of biography, like understanding after my husband’s death. It’s there as cookbooks in a fun essay on food. Reading is so interwoven with my life, in fact, it can’t help but tuck into or between nearly every line I write. 

Here's a list, then, of a few—just a few!—books from my Canadian shelf that take me back to the joy of the hours I spent with them.  

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The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence

Laurence was a huge influence on me, not only for her powerful storytelling but because her work's underlying rage was so necessary in that era of “women’s liberation.” Plus, she wrote about prairie places she’d lived in, places I knew as well. I read The Diviners in 1975 while my young husband and I were in Switzerland. So completely did I disappear into the life of protagonist Morag Gunn as she probes her future and her heritage, the mountain scenery and husband nearby became superfluous. (I don’t recall that he complained, however; fortunately he knew me well enough by then!)

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Crow Lake, by Mary Lawson

Crow Lake, which burst into the Canadian literary world as a debut novel both gripping and well written, was a Mother’s Day gift from my kids. After reading the prologue I noted in my journal that I was afraid to begin, really begin that is, because “I think it will be so good it will make me ache.” It did make me ache, the way stories about calamity and families can, but what also resonates still is its setting in the Canadian Shield. As if that’s exactly where it had to be. 

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A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews

I’ve read and enjoyed all Miriam Toews’ books but the one that summons most retrospective delight is A Complicated Kindness. I see myself in the big chair beside the fireplace of the house where we lived in 2004, engrossed in the grieving, questing voice of Nomi Nickel, chuckling too at her defiance and humour, for she’s not polite at all to Menno and his followers and I’d grown up Mennonite too. I read bits to my adult daughter when she visited and we laughed together and she read the book next, making this a memory of shared reading joy such as book clubs, whatever their size, collect. 

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The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje 

I remember the boy leaning over the ship railing, the narrative of his journey by sea from Ceylon to England. He’s in transition. He’s discovering the adult world. The sense of being “in between” is a frequent theme in Canadian writing and here the poetic, meditative effect of Ondaatje’s writing slows and contains it. His language made it seem possible, made it seem safer than we know it is. 

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The Free World, by David Bezmozgis 

This one is about transition too, between the past and future, peopled with compelling characters—set in 1978, Soviet Jews managing to get out of USSR, in Italy trying to get visas for the West. A brilliant combination of funny and sad. One character who has lived in both the USSR and in Israel, when told he won’t find what he’s looking for in the West, says: “I’m not looking for perfection. So far I’ve been a citizen of two utopias. Now I have modest expectations. Basically, I want the country with the fewest parades.” Canada, anyone?

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Us Conductors, by Sean Michaels

This was the first book that I “read” by listening to it, on Audible. Once I got used to it (though I confess I followed along in the text at first, afraid I might miss something), I was deeply absorbed. I worked on a jigsaw puzzle while I listened. This Giller-winner, based on the life of Lev Termen, scientist, spy, prisoner, and inventor of the theremin, is crisp and scientific but also finely observed and startling for its images. The wavering, almost ethereal sound of the theremin, which Google provided to me, weaves through this memory.  

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All Things Consoled, by Elizabeth Hay

Elizabeth Hay is probably best known for her fiction, but my happiness with her work resides in this memoir about her parents and her role in their last years. It was a mirror for my involvement with my own parents’ decline—"walking toward my past, which was also my future,” interacting with people who though “shrunken” are still “the two vivid giants in my life.” Page after page, yes, yes, yes. And when I heard Hay at the Vancouver Writers’ Festival and we chatted briefly while she signed my book, I told her how my sisters had eventually decided it was their turn and we moved my elderly widowed mother near them. Her inscription included, “For Dora, who is lucky in her sisters.” Yes to that as well.

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The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway

I didn’t get to this book when it came out, then resisted it later because of the controversy around events at UBC, but finally deciding I couldn’t judge that one way or the other myself, picked it up during the upheaval and seclusion that was the Covid pandemic. What a fine, fine book. Besides the beautiful writing and the unforgettable image of a cellist playing for 22 days at a site of a bomb attack that killed 22, this story set during the horrors of the 1990s siege in Sarajevo, so much worse than what we were going through, gave me a sharp helpful dose of perspective. 

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Children of the Day, by Sandra Birdsell

Somehow I missed this one earlier too, and I have no idea why, but my, what a marvelous and quite astonishing book. Seeing it on my shelf radiates remembrance of Birdsell’s other work, but this one, I’m convinced, is her best. Most of it happens on one day in June 1953, when Sara Vogt refuses to come down to breakfast and, as the day unfolds, we discover the history of both Sara, a Mennonite woman, and her husband, Oliver Vandal, a Métis man, and their large family. I was in a book study about decolonization that included discussion of Mennonite-Métis relations at the time and suddenly I had this unexpected juxtaposition, one that took me into the heart of the matter.

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Learn more about Return Stroke: 

These graceful, probing personal essays by award-winning fiction writer Dora Dueck engage with a diverse range of ideas (becoming a writer, motherhood, mortality, the ethics of biography, a child's coming-out) because in non-fiction, she writes, “the quest for meaning bows to the experience as it was.” Yet within Return Stroke, one theme in particular does resonate—change. “How wonderful,” the author writes, that our “bits of existence, no matter how ordinary, are available for further consideration—seeing patterns, facing into inevitable death, enjoying the playful circularity of then and now.”

The book’s title, Return Stroke—the title of one essay, where it literally refers to lightning—suggests such a dynamic: “When I send inquiry into my past, it sends something back to me.” The topic of memory, in all its malleability, impermanence, and surprising power, is especially central to the collection’s concluding piece, an absorbing memoir of the author’s 1980s life in the Paraguayan Chaco. Whether she is discovering the more meaningful part that imagination holds within her religious faith or relating with astonishing clarity and honesty the experience of giving birth away from her home country, Dora Dueck’s beautifully written essays and memoir make her an insightful and generous companion.