Winter Reading List 2024: Staff Picks!

With the winter break fast approaching, the staff at MQUP are eager to share our own recommendations for you to read on those long winter nights spent at home. Perfect timing, because we’re offering 30% off all titles on our website during the month of December with the coupon code SNOW30 (online only).

Aki-wayn-zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth

By Eli Baxter

Aki-wayn-zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth by Eli Baxter is one of the most important books that MQUP has had the honour of publishing. Winner of the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction, it combines the author’s childhood memories and his personal experience surviving the residential school system with stories about Anishinaabay life before European contact. The book also recounts Ojibway legends in their original language and includes spiritual teachings. It’s a completely unique and fascinating form of storytelling. All Canadians should read this book: I strongly recommend it as a meaningful gift this holiday season.

Roy Ward, Sales Manager

À la recherche d’Expo 67

Edited by Monika Kin Gagnon and Lesley Johnstone

Ma mère avait 12 ans à l’été 1967. Munie de son précieux « passeport » rouge – qu’elle conserve toujours –, elle se rendait presque quotidiennement à l’Expo avec sa grand-mère, émerveillée par ses pavillons grandioses et leur fenêtre inédite sur le monde. Comme j’aurais voulu y être moi-même! L’exposition universelle de 1967 tient assurément une place de choix dans notre mémoire collective. À la recherche d’Expo 67 permet de mieux comprendre l’héritage exceptionnel de cet événement d’envergure et comment il a été présenté au public lors de l’exposition qui lui a été consacrée en 2017 au Musée d’art contemporain. Grâce à une foule d’archives visuelles et textuelles, cet ouvrage permet à la fois d’apprécier la richesse de l’exposition muséale et de saisir l’importance culturelle et artistique d’Expo 67. Un superbe livre qu’il fait bon donner ou recevoir pour tout amoureux de Montréal!

Marie-Claude Felton, Editor

Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure

By James West Davidson and John Rugge

Great Heart is a true gem of the MQUP backlist. Voted one of National Geographic’s 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time, it’s the kind of book you just cannot put down. Somehow, the authors managed to write a gripping adventure tale that reads like a novel but that is based on rigorous historical research. The “great heart” at the core of the book, a Métis guide named George Elson who survives a first disastrous expedition into Labrador in 1903 only to return two years later to mount a second attempt, will stay with you forever. As The Globe and Mail pointed out when the book first published decades ago, “What a movie this book would make.” The dual 1903 and 1905 narratives, the romance that emerges in the second expedition, and the backdrop of the ruggedly beautiful Labrador landscape would all certainly make for a stunning film. But you should read the book first.

Anna Del Col, Marketing Manager

Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada

By Jamie Jelinski

I was excited when I first learned that MQUP would be publishing Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada. Tattooed folks love to discuss, read about, and pore over images of tattoos. I have three – my first a Celtic circle, which I got at a tiny tattoo shop thirty years ago in Kingston, Ontario, the birthplace of “Sailor Joe,” one of Canada’s first tattoo artists, who comes to life in Chapter Two of Jamie Jelinski’s book.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Jelinski’s work is both a deep dive into a fascinating story and a serious piece of art history, lavishly illustrated throughout. Needle Work will be wrapped up under the tree this holiday season for some of my inked loved ones, and it should be on the bookshelf of every tattoo shop across the country.

Jacqueline Davis, Publicist

Voluntary Detours: Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta

By Lianne McTavish

Have you ever heard of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum? What about the Museum of Fear and Wonder, which is located on a farm in Bergen, Alberta? Lianne McTavish has visited hundreds of rural museums in Alberta and writes about them in Voluntary Detours. Featuring colour photographs, this book highlights some of the quirkiest museums, challenging both what a museum is and what it might become. This is a fun book to give as a gift – or to keep for yourself!

Andrew Pinchefsky, Production Assistant

HA!: A Self-Murder Mystery

By Gordon Sheppard

HA! is the first MQUP book, though by now not the only one, that kept me up at night. It was first published a few years before I started working here. My new colleagues, who I was just getting to know, were still abuzz about this book – with eyerolls, reverence, recrimination, pride, a bizarre sense of latent disbelief that something had been accomplished. I was surrounded by a sense that something had happened that people did not fully understand; I certainly didn’t. A mixture of curiosity and wanting to fit in led me to bring an office copy home with me. I read it in two consecutive eight-hour shifts in the winter of 2005, wearing an itchy wool uniform, sitting bolt upright on a marble bench next to a hot radiator, inside a stately downtown apartment building where I worked as a night doorman. It transfixed me and like many great books, the reasons why are hard to pin down. It is a book all about the “why,” and its subtitle, A Self-Murder Mystery, is accurate: it is as gripping as the best whodunit even though both the who and the it are known in the opening scene. It is a book that is unclassifiable even as genre, in spite of the curt Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication headings on its copyright page – novel, biography, documentary, screenplay, collage, mixed-media experimental art – it has a claim to each and to all. Its accumulation of detail, its attempt to understand a life, is both inspiring – the sheer volume of detail, testimony, of documents assembled is evidence of the richness and complexity of life, of the desire to know and to understand – and frustrating – the more detail amasses, the less sure we can be of the individual and the act at the centre. It somehow manages to be grandiose and humble at the same time. It is also a book about creativity, about Quebec nationalism, about writing, about the city of Montreal, about despair, and about love. It is the most surprising and affecting use of documentary reproduction and what is broadly referred to as “production values” in a book that I have encountered. It’s the only MQUP book I know of with a list of book club discussion questions in it. And, though it doesn’t make the book that much lighter, it’s light on the pocketbook: for the value-conscious, like myself, who still love as much as we can get, the paperback edition has a good chance of being literally the “most book” that can be purchased for the princely sum of $32.95. It’s a one-of-a-kind testament to what a book can contain. It’s a hard book to give as a gift, because it’s not cozy, but it’s a book that always feels to me like it should be read after dark in the winter – maybe in your itchiest sweater and least comfortable chair, after all.

Jonathan Crago, Associate Director and Editor in Chief