Shane A’s Reviews > 101 Letters to a Prime Minister: The Complete Letters to Stephen Harper > Status Update

"A bookstore is a bookstore ... Everyone is welcome in bookstores and all types rub shoulders in them, the wealthy and the poor, the highly educated and the self-taught, the old and the young, the adventurous and the conventional, and others still. You might even bump into the Queen."

"An excellent way to climb back into yourself is to read a book... an entirely private experience. When you are reading, your guard needn't be up. You can be entirely yourself."

"My argument is that literature—as opposed to factual non-fiction—is an essential element to a deeply thinking, fully feeling mind in our complex twenty-first-century world. A mind not informed by the thoughtful product that is the novel, the play, the poem, will be capable perhaps of administering the affairs of a people, maintaining the status quo, but not of fully leading that people."