The theme for my title list may seem pedestrian. It is. I don’t own a car; so I walk, take the bus and the subway to get to work and back, every day. It takes me between twenty and forty minutes each way. And during this commute, I read books. Sometimes the read is so engrossing that I end up missing my stops or head north instead of south. The books on this list are all guilty of causing me such occasional mishaps. The voices in them are strong and uncompromising and have stayed with me long after the read. I hope you will find inspiration and pleasure in reading them as I have.

Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood: I read this book a long time ago, when I was still a student, going back and forth to my classes at Concordia University. I remember bursting into laughter in the midst of reading, and not wanting the book to end while not being able to put it down. It was a small used pocket book that I had bought at a second-hand bookstore called Cheap Thrills on Bishop Street. I was seduced by its humour and satire, its imaginative telling of Joan’s adventures and escapist fantasies.

The Diviners by Margaret Lawrence: I also read it while still a student and would like to re-read it now. This novel, set in the Prairies, is about the life of Morag Gunn, a writer, who in the process of writing a novel is also reminiscing about her own life. Richly textured narrative, that takes us into the mind and thought process of the writer. Reading it, back then, I remember being struck by two things: a particularly Canadian landscape and experience, and the depiction of a very strong, passionate female character. A woman who lives her life fully.

Friend of my Youth by Alice Munro: These are stories that will make you weep. Not from sadness, but a sense of gratitude and awe at being offered such beauty in words. How does Munro do it, how does she peel the apparently simple story from the outside in, taking you to the very depths of the human condition? Her style has been likened to Chekhov’s. I agree. Her stories also bring to mind Chardin’s paintings; everyday objects, domestic scenes that transcend the two dimensional canvas and offer us profound insight into our humanity. Be prepared to get lost in Munro’s words, and to miss your stops.

The Unconscious Civilisation by John Ralston Saul: “Whenever governments adopt a moral tone—as opposed to an ethical one—you know something is wrong.” Saul says in this thoughtful collection of essays. He describes “corporatism” as a concept invented in Europe in the 19th century by the new industrial elite, as an alternative to democracy. It is a system that destroys responsible individualism and participatory democracy in the interest of “groups”. There is no role for the citizen in such a system. The corporatist movement in Europe in the 1920s created Fascism. And if we look closely at the programs of most contemporary Western governments, we may recognize that they look a lot like Fascism.

The True Blue of Islands by Pamela Mordecai: I read this slim collection of poetry not long ago. The voice in these poems is that of childhood with its uncompromising honesty and simplicity. It is also a woman’s voice, distilling heartbreak into song. It has Jamaican rhythms and patterns. It tells stories of violence and abuse, yet there is humour and playfulness. These poems are marvellous. I fell in love with Mordecai’s voice and look forward to reading her upcoming collection of poems, Subversive Sonnets in the fall of 2012.

De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage: The horror of the Lebanese civil war is imprinted in the feverish, almost hallucinatory narrative. The descriptions are stark and visceral. The lament of ten thousand bombs raining on Beirut keeps returning. “Ten thousand bombs had split the winds, and my mother was still in the kitchen smoking her long, white cigarettes…” Through the lives of two young men, Bassam and George, Hage tells the story of the war that lasted fifteen years, displaying the brutal realities of sectarian fighting, foreign intervention and the gangster politics that kept it going.

Jewels and Other Stories by Dawn Promislow: A slim collection of fourteen short stories set in apartheid-era South Africa. The stories are told with elegant, understated simplicity which makes them all the more poignant and luminous. We are offered glimpses into the lives of white middle class households and their black servants who inhabit tin–walled homes in these stories that are like translucent windows upon which segregation, fear and oppression cast a blinding light.

Echoes from the Other Land by Ava Homa: The seven stories that make up this collection take place in Iran. The prose is purposeful and unfolds through short sentences and crisp dialogue. The young women and girls in these stories all struggle against the suffocating blanket of misogyny and oppression created by the hateful regime, the weakness of men, and society in general, where everyone is bent out of shape. It is the anger of women that keeps them erect with eyes wide open in these stories, and the scarves on their heads are always somehow falling off, or pulling back, or crumpling somewhere to reveal their locks.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel: This is the story of an orphaned boy adrift on a boat in the Indian Ocean with a bunch of wild animals; among them one ferocious tiger… Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) named after a swimming pool in France, lives in Pondicherry where his father owns a zoo. His family decides to immigrate to Canada, after selling the animals to a zoo in Japan. Some of the animals are also on the boat carrying the Patel family toward a new life in Canada. The ship sinks. Everyone dies except for Pi who ends up on a small life boat with a hyena, a hippopotamus, a zebra, an orang-utan and a Bengal tiger. What a suspenseful, fantastic and boldly imagined novel!

Loren Edizel was born in Izmir, Turkey and has lived in Canada most of her life. Her latest book is Adrift. One of her novels, The Ghosts of Smyrna, was published in Turkey in 2008 by Senocak Yayinlari (trans. Roza Hakmen) and a short story "The Conch" appeared (November 2009) in Turkish translation as part of an anthology entitled Izmir in Women's Stories. "The Imam’s Daughter" was published in Montreal Serai. She has recently completed a collection of short stories under the title “the confession”. She currently lives in Toronto