Three That Matter is an annual Bookstore initiative designed to celebrate reading as a shared, campus-wide practice. Each cycle, members of our community are invited to name three books that have shaped the way they think, work or see the world. These selections form a growing, evolving portrait of the ideas, stories and voices that circulate through our institution.
Curated by the Bookstore, this project is intended to strengthen our sense of community by making visible the many different paths that bring us together as readers. When students encounter the books that have mattered to people they see and learn from every day, it creates new points of connection, curiosity and conversation across disciplines and roles.
Throughout the year, featured titles will be highlighted and made available through the Bookstore at a 20 per cent discount, inviting everyone to take part in this shared act of discovery. Three That Matter is not just a list of books, but an ongoing invitation to reflect on what we read, why it matters and how those stories help shape who we are together.
Dr. Steven Urquhart's Three That Matter
L'étranger (The Stranger), Albert Camus (1942)
I teach this book in my intro to French Literature class. This book by an Algerian-born French author is a masterpiece in my opinion that plays on alienation, ambiguity and forces the reader to reflect on absolutes. While the book was published over 80 years ago, it is timeless, deeply ironic and speaks to the concept of in-betweenness.
Que serions-nous sans le secours de ce qui n'existe pas (Where would we be without the saving grace of that which does not exist), Simone Chaput (2020)
I love the title of this book, taken from a Paul Valéry (French poet) quote, and would like to translate this novel into English. Written by a contemporary Franco-Manitoban writer, it features interconnected stories, both funny and serious, and tells of characters linked by happenstance and family. It speaks to the importance of myth, beliefs, delusions, and ultimately love or those incommensurable things in our lives that really make life worth living. Highly crafted and intertextual, it combines both tragic and deeply heart-warming stories into one narrative.
Incubation, Gérard Bessette (1965)
This novel won the Governor General Award for Literature (French) in Canada in 1966. Written by Quebec author, Gérard Bessette, the novel has little punctuation and adopts a stream of consciousness for its narrative style. The story evokes Freud’s repetition compulsion due to trauma and features a Cornelian dilemma. The novel’s end is a warning in my opinion; it speaks to the title of Francisco de Goya’s famous painting, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos (The Dream or Sleep of Reason Produces monsters, 1799) and the danger of both ignorance and arrogance.
Closing thoughts
Canadian literature is excellent and worthy of our time, money and appreciation. Reading fiction is about more than following a story; it is about exploring other worlds at once factual and invented. Fiction is not separate from reality, but part and parcel of it. Think of Anne of Green Gables, Batman, Harry Potter… these characters, including others (Santa, Bart Simpson, etc.), are very present in our lives and can be major common points of reference that guide both individuals and civilizations.