The Paul Wells Show - The Summer Reading Episode

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

This week Paul Wells and three friends share their summer reading. Globe and Mail reporter Shannon Proudfoot, veteran Liberal strategist Scott Reid, and Juno-winning singer-songwriter Donovan Woods each discuss a book they're reading this summer — and a book they'd recommend from all their earlier summers of reading. It's a feast for bookworms.

So what are you reading this summer? So I'm reading What It Takes by Richard Ben Kramer. It's almost like a beachy read, like it's just like gossipy and beautiful and oh man it's just wonderful. I'm just I'm gobbling it up as fast as you can gobble up a thousand page telephone book. This week what we may eventually remember as the first annual summer reading episode. I'm Paul Wells, welcome to the Paul Wells show. This one is fun. We've been posting greatest hits from my Brief But Excellent archive this summer and that's cool, but I figured we were due for

something fresh and light and summery. I'm not going to lie. I swiped the idea for this week's episode from the 99% Invisible podcast. They did an episode where they just got the staff together to talk about what they're reading this summer. And if there's one thing book people have in common, it's that they love books and you can hear it in their voices. I wanted to get some of that feeling on this show. So today we're just going to talk about books. My guests are Shannon Proudfoot, the fantastic Globe and Mail political feature writer, who's

one of my favourite colleagues to compare notes with as we go through our respective work days. Scott Reed, the political analyst, speechwriter, and former communications director for Prime Minister Paul Martin. You may know Scott as the shy one on the Curse of Politics podcast. And Donovan Woods, the Juno-winning singer-songwriter who joined us from his cottage after wrapping up a long tour.

Donovan and I both grew up in Sarnia. Shannon and Donovan have a friend in common. Scott is the world's biggest Shannon Proudfoot fan and I've got a podcast. So that's how we're all connected. The rules were simple. Share with the group about the book you're reading this summer. Then pick one book out of all your previous summers of reading and talk about that. The results were amazing, as you will hear now. Let's talk about books. Um, everyone at least claims to be reading in the summer.

And I thought that you three were likely to actually, uh, be doing some reading in the summer. So Shannon, what are you reading this summer? Yeah. So I feel like I have to preface this because I know someone who once went into an interview with a Canadian newspaper carrying a copy of the New York times as a prop and got called out for it. So I feel like I have to say, this is not one of

those. I swear I'm actually reading this and it's spectacular. So I'm reading what it takes by Richard Ben Crane, which is a brick of a book. It's over a thousand pages long. It is, for those who are not sighing in delighted recognition like Scott and Paul, it is an astonishingly deep, detailed, but I would hasten to add, wildly readable account of the primaries for the 1988 presidential election. So I'm about 250 pages in and I just met little Joey Biden but I'm like knee-deep in George HW Bush, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart and oh man like as a piece of wordcraft Paul I think I actually already texted you the page I'm gonna read because when I got to this page my jaw dropped. So what it is that I was reading a bit last night

about how Kramer did it, there's different accounts. It either took him four years or six years to write it. I believe either, I would believe 12, but it came out, I think it came out in 92. So it must've been about four years. Came out during the next election cycle. His reporting was so deep at one point, he was living with Al Gore's family in Kansas,

like just kind of embedding with them to understand it. So it's got this beautiful, it's what I aspire to at my very best and rarely rarely reach where you know your subject so well, he's just constantly speaking in this omniscient narrator's voice. It's like he was a gargoyle, like perched on the shoulder of all these guys. But what's wild is it's not, I haven't even gotten to the contemporary stuff yet. Like he, it's very depth, depth, the, um, the structure of it. He kind of toggles back and forth because the idea is what it takes both. How do these people get here?

Why are they hungry for this? Why would they torment themselves in this way? What allows them to withstand this? Um, so he toggles back and forth between sort of each of the main characters, the main contenders, origin stories, and kind of contemporary flashes from the primaries. But what's wild is, and the bit I'm going to read out loud because I just need us all to understand, like to fully see without me paraphrasing clumsily, the depth of the reporting is it's not just stuff that he was there for, that he was in the room for, which fine, you know, if you work fast and you keep your antenna up and you listen, you can absorb a wild

amount of detail. It's way, way back. So I'm going to read you a bit from, this is a chapter about, or one of the many chapters about young George H.W. Bush. Just for the sake of clarity here, he calls him Poppy because in his family that was his nickname because he reminded everyone of his grandfather so he came to be known as Poppy or Pop. So this is like this is 88 so I don't know how old Bush is by that point late 40s 50s. So this is going back to his college baseball days. So we're rewinding about 30 years here and this is what some of what he writes. This whole section, I would say, like on George Bush's college baseball at Andover, goes on for about six pages. But here's a little bit. And he's also for the sake of clarity, the guy he's talking

about called Flop is a coach, sort of an old wizened old man who's kind of tossing the ball back and forth. Here. Finally, there was Poppy alone, crouched on the balls of his feet at first space, and all the fellows, whatever they were doing, fiddling with a mitt, tying spikes, everyone stopped to watch this thing between Poppy and Flop. It was so intimate, just between them really, but it was also a touchstone for the game to come, a check of the hands that day. Flop would hit a grounder down to first and Poppy would throw home. The catcher would throw back to first and Poppy would fire back to the plate. But

he wouldn't run to the bench, he charged the plate right down the baseline, streaking in. And Flop would try to wrap one by him. Never too hard, he made it fair. But you could see in the jawline of that old coach, he was trying to beat that kid's beautiful hands. And what they remembered most was the way Poppy came at him, flying down the line with the air and the strain pulling his face taut, laughing with the pure joy of contest. Like, can you even imagine the depth of reporting to be able to write that with that level of authority and detail about 25, 30 year old events? And there's a clear through line, right? Because the whole thrust

of Bush versus Gore in this book is that everything is a struggle for Gore and everything is Gore just gritting things out and everything is easy for George. George just cruises in with a big smile on his handsome face and the world just offers itself up for him. I always think when I watch hockey that I'm sort of at a disadvantage. I can watch a lot of hockey with my husband but because I've never played like not even like I mean I shoot balls with my kids in the driveway. When great players play by definition they make everything look easy and because I've never tried to do it I have no concept of how hard the thing is they're making easy. I've never tried to do it. I have no concept of how hard the thing is they're making easy, but I do a little tiny

baby version of what Kramer does. And that blows my damn mind, uh, how he did that, the depth of reporting. And it's also so conversational. Like as much as this sounds like a try hard pick, it's almost like a beachy read. Like it's just like gossipy and beautiful. And oh man, it's just wonderful.

I'm just, I'm gobbling it up as fast as you can gobble up a thousand page telephone book. The thing about the 88 election is for anyone who's lived through that chunk of history, it would have to be on anyone's list of the least significant American elections. And yet this guy gives you a thousand pages of it and you can't stop reading.

You know. That's pretty tough. I thought, Donovan, you're going to wonder like, God, how did I wander into this land of prophets? Sorry, because we've all read this book. It might be my favorite political book of all time. Like, on All I See is Shannon. I just love it. And my, it's been a long time since I've read it, but the thing that I remember most keenly

is also about George H.W. Bush. When he describes George H.W. Bush's mental gymnastics, literally like writing about the efforts he's going to not to curse out loud. So he doesn't want to curse because that would offend everything that is patrician about George H.W. Bush and everything about George H.W. Bush is patrician. So he couldn't possibly curse in public.

And so he's like trying to find words and then it all kind of emerges in that gobbly goo Dana Carvey impersonation kind of goofiness stuff and it's, Oh God. And when you get to Biden, you're going to love it, Shannon, cause it is, it is a portrait that now in contrast with, you know, more recent events is really quite startling cause that's when the big lift of his, of his speech comes, right? So anyway, it's kind of, yeah, it's kind of like, I almost wish I'd read this last summer,

except I had no time to breathe last summer. But yeah, it's, it is an astonishing piece of journalism. And it's not, there's no ego. The writing to me doesn't wreak a Vigo, which I think I wouldn't like. It's, it's very down to earth. Beautiful. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so to me doesn't wreak a ego, which I think I wouldn't like. It's, it's very down to earth. Beautiful. Yeah. So Scott, the bar is high. What are you

reading this summer, Scott Reed? Sorry, I didn't mean to do that. Well, it's kind of pathetic because like, first of all, I will say I'm reading an endless stream of comic books, both online. Yes, I read comic books online now, but also like in hardcover. So I'm particularly enjoying Jeff Lemire's Minor Ocona, which I had missed when he first put it out. So now I'm reading it in a collected version. But I, again,

Donovan, you're gonna be like, what in hell am I doing here? Why did I end up in this terrible corner of political nerd library? But I'm reading a two volume, get a load of me, pretentious tit, that I am a two volume biography of William Lyon Mackenzie King by this guy, Anton Wagner, who I think you guys know,

my buddy Art from Kingston, Art Millans, put me onto this. So Art had received this when it was unpublished and told me, you've got to read this. It's a two volume, it's called The Spiritualist Prime Minister. It is an unbelievably comprehensive catalog of the extent of Mackenzie King's spiritualist and just flat out strange experiences, right? So that corner, so. So is this book new? Like has it been published recently or? Yeah, so there's a famous book from like 50 famous

within like political history circles, CP Stacy, who was actually a military historian and therefore political historians looked down on their nose at him and thought that he was a bit of a charlatan, he wrote a book called A Very Double Life and that, and like 40, 50 years ago, that's what blew the lid off the fact that King was a spiritualist and he wrote about

and disclosed the existence of what was called the little table, a King's mirror where he would hold seances and so on and so forth. It became a matter of real dispute. Then the King Diaries were released. When I was at Queens, I actually ran this great scam when I was one credit shy of graduating, where I got them to just like basically I just got to go and read the King Diaries in the archives.

And then I had to write like a 50 page thing about it. And they give me a full credit for doing that in May and June so I could like actually get my degree. So I became immersed in that life. And it's, it is like the King Diaries were talking like 400,000 pages of like, he collected all letters, he would write, he would keep all the Christmas cards he received and correspondence, but then he would also make copies of the Christmas cards that he would send to others. He would keep a note of what he said in those cards. From the time he was like 20, he was cataloging and recording his own history. So certain was he that he was bound for destiny and so obsessed was he with the idea of writing his own obituary, his own record, right? But the diaries are fascinating

because you therefore know that they are his elevated, puffed up notion of what he was doing and what his motives were. But no one can write that much without betraying themselves. So then you start to read in between the lines what was really going on and all those idiosyncrasies. Anyway, C.P. Stacey goes through all this stuff. He goes through a bunch of other material. Fifty years ago, he discloses that King was a spiritualist, and this causes a bit of a sensation in political circles. Some historians rejected it and they said it was, you know, kind of half-assed tomfoolery history. Now Wagner, and it's been accepted since then,

but Wagner has gone from, he'd done this massive comprehensive recording where he goes through and like, he had something like 133 sessions of fullledged seances. He went to England, especially during his years as opposition leader and after he was prime minister for a year or two before he died, goes to England. He had favorite mediums in England and he would make contact, I shit you not, with a list of characters that would bend your brain. He would talk about seances where obviously Wulford Laurier will come and say it to speak to him, FDR after he passed away, right? John the Baptist, Anne Boleyn, Queen Victoria, there were no end,

more pedestrian folks obviously as well, but these great historical characters, his mother would be a frequent guest, his brother had passed. So he would have these seances and they would always be So he would have these seances and they would always be astonishingly reassuring. So, it would always be like, President Roosevelt visited last night. There'd be like these, he visited our little table and reassured me that my assessment of the Europeans was quite right and the Canada must keep itself aloof.

You know, and it'd be blah, blah, blah, all this stuff and always that. So I'll read a little, he became obsessed, but also he was a lifelong bachelor, but not homosexual, very weird, between his mother and he had a lifelong best friend, this society lady in Ottawa, Joan Paterson. His ability to interrelate with women was extraordinary.

It's just like you and me, Shannon, right? Very, very awkward, very uncomfortable. There's something deeply flawed and emotionally captured about it. But so he became obsessed with this one woman, Miss Elliot, who was a medium. She would become a frequent, Ellen Elliot. She was a frequent visitor. So here's just a little, I'll read you a quick sample. I won't go into, I mean, there's passages from this that are banana Rama, because he does annotate all of these interactions.

She's a woman of wide business experience, very alert and active. She told me, this is King himself and as captured by Wagner. She told me all this had happened within the past two weeks. She is confident there would be further considerable developments. No one in this wide world will make me believe

that her wanting to see me, bringing these photographs, and wanting to see me was a matter of chance. That she was not directed to come and to bring me what would be evidence beyond all doubt that my mother and others were working with her or letting me see this great Russian espionage business is something in which they are all interested and that I am being brought into contact with them. Also, that they are living preserving their personalities and helping that there's no such thing as death as we think of it but a continuation hereafter of life. This was the longest serving prime minister in the country, the longest

serving prime minister in Commonwealth history, a man renowned for his mercenary skill in dispatching opponents, and he believed in everything. It's astonishing. He believed that his mother guided him. He would receive these messages and endless numbers of seance, spiritualists, and he believed in electric currents of magnetic pulses that guided sexual impulse and sexual desire and Wagner writes extensively about it. So it's a fascinating read.

I know it's not, you don't think of it as exactly summer doc reading, but like, I am loving it to death and it is in its own way wildly sensational. He was messed up. He was messed up. King was messed up. He was, you know, the Dennis Lee thing, right? He played with a string and thought of his mother, but. It's fun though. It sounds, it sounds like a blast.

It sounds horrifying. Donovan, what are you reading this summer? The last thing I read that I really liked was a book by this guy called Keith McNally, who is a restaurateur who started a bunch of famous restaurants in New York. And I'd never heard of this guy's restaurants. The only reason I knew about one of them, one

of them called the Odeon is because it's on the cover of a Richard Price book that I read. And I didn't even realize it was a real restaurant, but Keith McNally started that restaurant. He had a stroke. He wrote a long memoir after having a stroke. And he talks about how he types after having a stroke.

And it's all very arduous, intense process. But it's a guy. The reason I bought the book is because I was attracted to the title, which is, I regret almost everything, which I relate to intensely. I feel that way about most everything that I don't know what it is about that sentence but as soon as I saw that book I was like whatever this says I think I'm reading it. And it's about this

restaurateur this guy's from England grew up in in in London and turns out he grew up like two streets away from a Airbnb that I often rent in London when I'm there writing songs and I was in Bethnal Green and it was thrilling to hear about that. And then he moved to New York when he was in his 20s after like, you know, being in theater and touring the world and then the list of the restaurants he started was like Balthazar, Minetta Tavern, Pastis, like the ones you've heard about from Sex and the City and things like that, you know, I mean, like restaurants that are kind of in the culture in some way, you can hear about them all the time. Anyway, so his memoir is all about his life. It's really interesting. It's not a role model. It's kind of an anti-hero in a certain way. And I have a real attraction

to for better, you know, for lack of a better pieces of shit who really succeed in a big time way. I have like a real sort of empathy for them. I love them for some reason. And there's something about his like naked, strange ambition that is really inspiring to read about. He just sees a space, decides that it needs to be a restaurant. And then he follows these weird dreamy steps to acquire the furniture and the things that he needs to make it exactly as he decides

it to be. It goes wildly over budget, and then they open it up and it succeeds wildly. And then he does this like over and over and over again. I think to the detriment of his personal life, his kids seem to be lukewarm on him at best, his wives are not, nobody likes him, but there's just something about his story. He just keeps getting beat down and continues to get back up. It's almost like he's a person of destiny or something.

By the end of it, it's emotional. I was emotional about how incredible this guy's life was. This is kind of the appeal of memoir and biography a lot of the time is that someone of great accomplishment, you, you, you, it's like the Wizard of memoir and biography a lot of the time is that someone of great accomplishment, you, you, you, you, it's like the wizard of Oz, you pull back the

curtain and it is, the person is not at all what you would have deduced from the, the public accomplishment, right? Like they're, we're all messed up basically. If they write a good, honest one, right? There's also like the sand off all the edges, useless kind of PR exercise ones, but the human ones and messy

ones are way better. Political memoir too often is where someone sits down and says, look, I've thought about it all and I was right all along. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I was right or I was justified, but

it's never. Yes. At long last redemption is like the standing head for every political memoir. I'm reading, I thought about curating my choice and picking something that would, you know, be clever or make me seem whatever. Boo, don't do that.

I decided to, I decided to go with what I'm actually reading, which is a book called, uh, Going Around Selected Journalism of Murray Kempton. Have any of around selected journalism of Murray Kempton. Have any of you guys heard of Murray Kempton? No, this is the thing. I just had to say I haven't, sorry. He was, uh, a leading newspaper columnist in New York city for like, uh, more than half

of the 20th century. He died in 1997 in his eighties. He was this courtly fellow who would always wear a dark suit and tie and ride around New York on his bicycle. Usually go to the court in the morning and find like the most interesting trial. For most of his life and most of what people read, first of all, he was, he was barely read outside

of New York city, but he was like a hometown hero to like the, the greats of, of, of journalism. So David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker says he was the one true original in the business. Uh, Joan Didion called him the best we have and better than we deserve. And so there's this little cottage industry of people who are just valiantly trying to mythologize Murray Kempton. and called him the best we have and better than we deserve. And so there's this little cottage industry of people who are just valiantly trying to

mythologize Murray Kempton. But the thing about him is, uh, he's a punishingly difficult read. He's the most ornate, uh, and, and, and kind of, uh, high flown writer I've ever come across in daily journalism. And yet he, he almost only ever wrote for New York city tabloids.

He was for decades at the New York post and then near the end of his life, he was at the, uh, New York, New York daily news or no, New York news day, which is no longer publishing in New York. And, and so he was writing for the lunch bucket crowd, he was writing for a working class audience, but it, it offended his sensibilities to think that he would ever

talk down to these people. And, uh, and so Murray Kempton was like sort of high intellectual investment to even get through his pros, uh, and that actually defeated him as, uh, an interviewer. He tried a couple of times to do the sort of public interviewing stuff that I do, but he himself admitted that what he would do was he would talk for a half

hour and then the interview subject would have to say, yeah, I basically agree. So, so, and, and so the, the, the, near the end of his life, uh, he died again in, in 97, William F. Buckley, uh, forked out a bunch of money for, uh, to publish a collection of his journalism, to try and put them on the map. And then the Joan Diddians and the David Redneck

said, yes, yes, Murray Kempton is the greatest among them, but that's almost a quarter cent. That's more than a quarter century ago. Now a couple the David Repnick said, yes, yes, Murray Kempton is the greatest among them, but that's almost a quarter cent, that's more than a quarter century ago. Now a couple of younger people have put out this new collection, which is an attempt to get Murray Kempton out of memory and into history to make him a legendary figure for people who would

never hear of him. And he was a lefty from way back. He started out in his student days as a, uh, like overtly communist, and then he moderated a little bit. And he was an absolute champion of the civil rights movement in the South. He would sit in the back of these Baptist

churches, he would interview the family of Emmett Till after he got, uh, murdered. He was like, he was, uh, there on the freedom march, he was like he was there on the Freedom March. He was, and so a lot of his journalism is a constant plea for social justice and really about class. And I also have excerpts. I'll read at least one. We'll see whether I can get through the second excerpts. Um, I'll read at least one.

I'll, um, we'll see whether I can get through the second excerpt. Um, the first one in 1956, he, his, his buddy, his drinking buddy, uh, William F Buckley had been publishing national review for about a year. And, uh, Murray Kempton collected eight months worth of, uh, copies of the national review, read all 500 pages and announced that it was just terribly

boring and that his friend William Buckley was a failure. And that the worst thing for William Buckley, who wanted to be interesting was to be a bore. And here's how he writes that. I think I know Buckley well enough to feel that I could pronounce to him, nothing crueler than

the judgment that his magazine is a bore. He is a young man capable of considerable esprit Buckley well enough to feel that I could pronounce to him, nothing crueler than the judgment that his magazine is a bore. He is a young man capable of considerable esprit as a companion. He means a drinking companion. He can be preferable to the average assistant professor of political science who regards him

as an enemy of the light. I do not wish him to fail, except in the superficial sense of dying an old man without ever seeing the kind of America he thinks he wants. And if I did wish him to fail, I could not wish him the emptiness of this particular failure. Ooh. Oh man.

And then, and then it's like 50 years later, Buckley pays for the publication of, of his, his greatest, you know, because, you know. Respect. It's like the, it's like the, the, the, the sheepdog and the wolf in the Warner Brothers cartoons, morning Sam, like they would, you know, tear each other to shreds and then they would be

pals. This one's heavier. Um, during the Montgomery, uh, bus boycott, um, he talks about a session at one of the churches in Montgomery, Alabama, and all the people who are being treated so horribly and we're so sure that they were right and that their children's children's children's

would talk about them. He says, they come and they sit in sparse barns like Bethel Baptist Church with signs of their poverty and weakness all around them and they sing the assurance of ultimate peace. I knew this would happen. And they sing the assurance of ultimate peace in victory. The most hostile white man who came to watch them had to confess that they are better led and sure of the end than he is. The deep south has come face to face with the cruel fact that one side possesses all the privileges and the other, all the saints. Wow.

It's like. Lovely writing. There's 30 pieces like that in this book. All right. So that was new books. What do you folks have to recommend from all of your previous summers of reading? Shannon? All right.

As the token girl here, I'm just going to lean into that. And here, I'm just going to lean into that. Um, and also this is going to be a lot, I don't know, not lighter exactly, but more elegiac, I guess. So, uh, your listeners will not be able to see, but I have in my hands, my original copy of

the eighth of the Anne of Green Gables book. So I still have my whole original box set that I got when I was, I don't know, maybe 12 or something, which is an extremely middle-aged Canadian lady thing to have. But the, so the book obviously everyone knows begins with Anne, but it's an epic sweep. There's eight books in the series and the last two books are all about her kids. So the seventh book is all about her children as kids. And the eighth book takes place during the First World War. And it is about this idyllic family facing the war. And it is all

about the Canadian home front during the war. But the eighth book is called Rilla of Ingleside. And Rilla is her youngest daughter. And it's my favorite of the whole series. There's whole passages of it that are still kind of in my memory. Rilla is sort of Anne reincarnated a little bit, you know, although she's beautiful where Anne always considered herself plain and awkward looking. Rilla is gorgeous and spirited and there's a lot is made of the fact that Rilla has no ambition. Rilla is basically a party girl when the book starts. And then Rilla spends the war at home, adopts a war baby at the age of 16 and raises him and is sort of holding down the home fires.

But the relevant part that I'm going to read a little bit of. So Anne has six children. Her second oldest son is Walter. And Walter is, he's just different than the other kids. Super sensitive, a poet, loves beauty, hates pain, hates violence, is often made fun of as a sissy by kids at school. I actually did a bit of reading because I wondered if Walter was coded that he was supposed to be gay, but there's not a lot of like persuasive scholarship that suggests that's really it. Walter is just a gentle soul and Walter and Rilla are

incredibly closely bound, even though on the surface they are the two most different of the children. And so when war breaks out, Walter's brave older brother Jim immediately enlists and off he goes and sort of thinks it's going to be a merry brave adventure. And Walter holds out as long as he can and then decides he has to for the sake of his own sense of dignity, his own sense of pride, even though he fears not death but violence and ugliness. He doesn't want to know about the ugliness of the world. And finally he enlists and when he enlists, Rilla's heart is broken. Like the

whole story of Walter going off to war is told through the pain Rilla experiences and the worry. And so this is about two-thirds of the way through the book. The family has a dog named Dog Monday. And when the boys go off to war, this, I might choke up as I read this, so I'm sorry. When the boys go off to war, Dog Monday parks himself at the end of the train platform and stays and waits for them to come home. He does not leave the train station the entire time the Blythe boys are off at war. And then one night, Dog Monday starts howling in the middle of the night and stands at the end of the train platform and howls and howls and howls.

And the family hears about this from the station master. And it's almost difficult to rewind your brain, but in a time where you'd wait three days for the newspaper reports or a telegram, this seems very ominous that the dog seemed to know something had gone awry. And so the family sort of waits on tenterhooks and this whole chapter that I'm going to read the very end of is the family on eggshells waiting to see what Dog Monday knew. And then after a few days go by and there's no bad news, they kind of relax and on I think it's the fifth day Rilla

kind of returns to herself and she wakes up in the morning and there's sunshine and even though it's a war Rilla's sort of irrepressible spirit comes back So I'm gonna read just the very end of this chapter When five days had passed oh also to explain Ingleside is the house where they live When five days had passed the Ingleside people began to feel that they might be cheerful again. Rilla dashed about the kitchen helping Susan, that's their housekeeper, with the breakfast and singing so sweetly and clearly that cousin Sophia, who is sort of the neighborhood cranky old lady, across the road heard her and croaked out to her neighbor,

sing before eating, cry before sleeping, I've always heard. croaked out to her neighbor. Sing before eating, cry before sleeping, I've always heard. Sorry, I'm gonna lose it. But Rilla Blythe shed no tears before the nightfall. When her father, his face gray and drawn and old, came to her that afternoon and told her that Walter had been killed in action at Corcelet, she crumbled up in a pitiful little heap

of merciful unconsciousness in his arms, nor did she waken from her pain for many hours. That's the first book that ever made me cry. I think I was maybe about 12 the summer I read it. And I just think at the risk of like reverse engineering something that may not be true. When I read this again, and that whole passage is sort of burned into my memory, I think maybe what I learned from that as a writer is that the heavier the thing is that you write,

the lighter a touch you use. That you just you treat it with great respect and delicacy and sensitivity. These books mean so so much to me and I keep trying to press them on my, like a drug dealer and get her to let me read them. But the structure of this final book and the structure of that death. Oh my God, as a writing feat, it's just, it's carved on my heart. So thanks for indulging me. Wow. I have to start reading those books from the first one.

They're incredible. There, I, I sometimes worry that they get painted as like, I don't know, Wow. That's so nice. I have to start reading those books from the first one. They're incredible. I sometimes worry that they get painted as like, I don't know, Thomas Kinkade painting books, but they are genuinely wonderful, wonderful works of literature and world building. Like they, I started reading them during the pandemic just for comfort, but they're, they're

really beautiful. They shouldn't be underestimated. Huh. Scott, what do you, what, what's, what do you have from all of your summers? Well, I'm not going to cry, which is unusual for me. Cause frankly, uh, you know, I can watch an episode of the beachcombers and burst into tears.

So, uh, but I'm, I might actually does have an equally. I thought a lot about this and, and, and I, I thought about reading on the dock at the cottage literally, right? And then I thought, where is the cottage? Oh, it's in Hastings County. And what's a book that really, really, really grabbed me by the throat? And when I was about 17 or 18, and I know this is like the whitest thing in the world, what I'm about to say, and the most Hastings County thing in the world, Hastings Prince Edward County, Donovan, the HDPs.

So I read the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, right? And it is the quintessential old stock Canadian novel. And I love Fifth Business. Like I just, the first book in that trilogy, Fifth Business, and what, you know, it's also interesting structurally. I mean, I don't have the writing talent of you guys, but it's in some ways an epistolary novel. Like it is, the premise of the novel

is that an aging school teacher is angered by the way his career is summarized by a student in a, in a, in a sort of local circular. And he writes the headmaster of the school and sort of says, well, here's a little bit of complexion on my life and tells this story about growing up in, um, in Deptford, which is a stand in for a small Ontario town, right. And carries them through. So this guy wins a Victoria cross in the first world war. He's, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's for a small Ontario town, right, and carries them through. So this guy wins the Victoria Cross in the First World War. He's a non-believer Presbyterian who dedicates himself

to the study of Catholic saints. He has a number of experiences with love and sex, more love than sex and not as much of both. He's a lifelong bachelor. His friend grows up to be an EP Taylor like figure of business and would be politics and all that stuff. And it's all like, it's got that small, if you grew up where I grew up and you come from East Ontario the way I did, right? It's got that small town Presbyterian. We may be people of extraordinarily modest means, but that does not mean we can't put on airs and look down on others. And there's that sort of small town snobbery that runs through it. And I'll just read this quick passage, which I know sounds as boring as snot, but this literally could have been a description of my hometown when I was growing up. We had an

official population of about 500 and the surrounding farms probably brought the district up to 800 souls. We had five churches, the Anglican, who were believed to have some mysterious social supremacy, the Presbyterian, solvent and thought chiefly by itself to be intellectual, the Methodist, insolvent and fervent, the Baptist insolvent and saved, the Roman Catholic mysterious to most of us, but clearly solvent as it was frequently and so we thought quite needlessly repainted." He goes on for a long full page to describe it. But this story, I mean, it even has a dash of stage, magician and murderer at the end. And it's, I just, I can literally, you know, like the great books, if you pick a book off the shelf, it's, it's almost like a time machine. Like I look

at the book and I remember laying on the old dock, because now we have a new doc at the cottage reading this book and thinking, my God, this rings my Eastern Ontario Hastings County Prince Edward County bell. So Robertson Davies, the style and the subject matter of which he wrote, I think is now feels very dated, but my God, what a powerful writer and fantastic. The Deptford Trilogy, Salterton Trilogy, which he followed up with was written about Kingston, where I also went to school. So, um, yeah, so that's my choice. This confers my theory that everybody's more,

uh, literate than I am. Cause I've only read, uh, fifth business. I, I, I, I face planned to really try to go past that one, but, uh. The second book, Manticore is about the son of one of the characters in the book goes to Switzerland and goes under Jungian psychotherapy. And that may be wrong.

You may not be able to call it psychotherapy was Jungian, but anyway, he goes under therapy with Jungian and the whole book is just him with his doctor. It's a slog, but you know, it's a snapshot of what the mind of a privileged male in the 1970s was like. Donovan Woods, what would you recommend out of all of your summers of reading? So I don't have an incredible amount

of summers of reading. I never read a book until I was in my late twenties, really. I pretended to read the Stone Angel and I pretended to read a lot of books. Everyone, every Canadian child pretended to read the Stone Angel. Absolutely.

Mr. Scrutton's English it. Everyone, every Canadian child pretended to read The Stone Age. Absolutely. It was a nightmare. Absolutely. Mr. Scrutton's English class. Jesus, Bram Shipley killed me now. Yeah, that book is a nightmare. And it also ruined me for books.

I was just like, oh, reading sucks. But it turns out it's just The Stone Age will suck. But so when I was in my 30s, I don't remember the year that it came out, but I read it the year it came out and I had read all of Richard Ford's books. I read the Sports Writer trilogy by Richard Ford, which was kind of the first books that I ever like. I read the Sports Writer first and I thought like, oh, okay, this is, you know, when you just hear an author and you're like, oh, I get it. There are people who are incredibly good at this and are describing my internal life with the clarity that I've

never really felt articulated. But like, he was the first one that did that. And this was a new book that he put out, it was a book called Canada. I was new at the time I read it. And I remember reading on the dock at a cottage that I, and it's this, so it's about this boy whose parents do this awful, poorly planned bank robbery in Montana, and they get arrested, they go to jail, and then he gets sent away to live with someone in Saskatchewan. So it starts in Montana,

and then it does this thing where it goes over the border. And since growing up in a border town like I did, we were over the border all the time. And even as like a five-year-old, six-year-old, I remember being able to feel a difference between the air in America and the air and it was like 500 yards from my house, you know, it was like two kilometers from my house where we were in America and I was like, it's different here and I don't know how to articulate the sort of detail

of why but I always knew that it was and this book kind of gets into that and does the best job of describing the differences between, you know, Montana and Saskatchewan, which are not far from each other, but it does a great job of describing the sort of granular feeling differences when you cross the border. And I've always been obsessed with that since I was a kid. Also, just an outsider describing Canada is like, you know, I mean, like there's something that somebody like, it's, it's a, it's a different thing to have someone describe us in that way. We just love to describe ourselves all the time. I think a lot of it is BS. And I think that it's like what everyone Billy Bob, Billy Bob Thornton said the thing about

that we were mashed potatoes without the gravy. And it hurt us so much because there we felt like that was it hurt us so bad. Because when you think about it, like there's something about that, and we want to throttle that guy because he like, it's like that he does a bunch of things talking about Saskatchewan and then allow the, then some of the book takes place in Winnipeg. You don't hear as much about Winnipeg, but he does such a great job of describing the differences. And also the story is wonderful. It's a wonderful story of an orphan kid who's like finding a place in a culture that he's not from.

And then like Richard Ford does, it jumps 20 years and then you see him as a grown adult, dealing with his sister's illness. And it's like, it's just a wonderful read. And that guy is like, I've read like some profiles of Richard Ford that made me feel like I would not want to even drink a coffee with him But there's something about his writing like I don't know It's one of those ones where he goes on comma after comma in a sentence and for some reason it's not disruptive It's like a joy to read you want to go back and read little sections all the time It really was the first book that I went to oh I could read that again and again and it would be you know a joy every single time. It really was the first book that I went, oh, I could read that again and again, and it would be a joy every single time.

Yeah. So that's my Richard Ford Canada. It is, it's fantastic. It ends up being a pretty good gangster story. Like the transition to Canada isn't a huge part of the book, right? But it's just so striking. Like these people come from the rural

American Midwest in the early sixties. And when they go to Canada, it's horrifying to them because it's far worse than what they grew up with, which I found hilarious. You know, my turn to bat cleanup. I had no idea how to pick a book. And then I remembered that the that the mandate was summer. So in the summer of 1992, I was backpacking through Europe and I brought with me copies of

Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving and Solomon Gershky was here by Mordecai Richler. And it was the second John Irving book I read, the first Mordecai Richler book I ever read. And I remember I was hauling my tired ass up a Swiss Alp and pausing, sitting on rocks to catch my breath, like for like an hour at a time while these like families of little Swiss children and like these 80 year old Swiss dudes would go loping up this, like for like an hour at a time, while these like families of little Swiss children and like these 80 year old Swiss dudes would go loping

up this mountain trail like gazelles. And I thought, so one thing that summer did was get me into a gym for the first time in my life. Um, I finished a prayer for Owen Meany first, and it is to this day, one of my favorite books. And I thought, man, this is going to be hard to top. And then I started reading Solomon Gursky was here and Mordecai absolutely smoked John Irving.

It is like effortlessly writers don't think like this, but I suspect Mordecai would have been happy to hear. It's just effortlessly superior on every level. It is a vast, it is his big Canadian novel. Barney's version is quite a bit more personal and quite a bit narrower. And this is his coming to terms with the whole sweep of Canadian history and geography. It's a thinly veiled, Romain Auclay about the

Bronfmans. It is one of his many, many love letters to his wife, Florence, because the Mordecai character falls in love with someone who he doesn't begin to deserve. Uh, it's like the whole Mordecai's mortis board was right there. And, um, through work, I was, I was lucky

enough to get to know, uh, more his family than him, but him a little bit later, but I knew nothing about the guy when I sat down and I'm like, I'm, I'm a fan for life. And I was, I was just thinking about it. I thought I would crack my old copy of the book and now I'm back in it. I'm 80 pages into it.

I'm going to finish it next week. Uh, it's like, you can't not tear through this book. Anyway, that's mine. Oh man. I love Mordecai. In the summer of 1992 with Mordecai Richler, I got very drunk actually. Oh really? A delightful, exciting event because I love Joshua then and now. But you know, there's a

connection between us, Paul, because A Prayer for Owen Meany and Fifth Business, they have almost the exact same inciting incident at the beginning of the book. Like it's almost a direct a connection between us, Paul, because a prayer for Owen Meany and Fifth Business, they have almost the exact same inciting incident at the beginning of the book. Like it's almost a direct lift and John Irving has acknowledged the massive influence of Fifth Business on the prayer for Owen Meany.

Like it's literally like the snowball stone hitting the woman, like the whole bit, like it's almost. Holy cow. Precisely the same. I had forgotten that. Yeah. That's kind of fun when, when people like rip each other off shamelessly.

If, if you're that blatant, it, it, it elevates it to a level where you just have to admire it. If you do transparently, then you know, it's a, then, then, you know, it's not a lift. It's a, it's a, it's an homage. It's respect. Um, all right.

I think we have, uh, accomplished what I wanted, which is to, to remind everyone what a great pleasure it is to fall in love with a book. Oh man. Yeah. And to hang out. This is delightful. I'm putting all of your books that I have

not read on my list. This is wonderful. Man, I'm going to do some, but I'm not going to do those political memoirs guys. I'm going to be going straight with you. I'm not going to do those journalist memoirs. Sorry. I won't do this.

I got to sit on my porch and read the Anne Green Gables novels and just ball my eyes out. People are going to walk by and say, what in hell is wrong with that guy? Scott, you're getting dangerously close to sassing my favorite books and that's going to end that loop for you. It's not. It's love. It's love.

On that note, thanks everyone for spending time with me and with one another. I have a hunch this is the first of many summer reading and reading books. I'm sure you've read a lot of them. I'm sure you've read a lot of them. On that note, thanks everyone for spending time with me and with one another. I have a hunch this is the first of many summer reading episodes of The Paul Wells Show. Enjoy the rest of your summer guys.

Thank you. Thanks. This is so much fun. See you everybody. That's The Paul Wells Show for this week. Because it's the middle of summer, my list of thank yous is shorter. Thanks to my executive producer Suzanne Hancock for rounding up the panel and handling all

the production work this week. Thanks to Kevin Bright for writing the theme music and Andy Milne for playing it on piano. If you like the Paul Wells show, tell your friends. I hope you're having a great summer.