101 Letters to a Prime Minister Read Online Free PDF

literary ideal of mine, besides a great read.
    Yours truly,
    Yann Martel
    P.S. Happy birthday
.
    G EORGE O RWELL (1903–1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, journalist, essayist, poet and literary critic. He was born in India into what he called a “lower-upper-middle class” family. He fought and was wounded in the Spanish Civil War. His two most famous works,
Animal Farm
and
1984
, reflect his signature style as well as his two largest preoccupations: his consciousness of social injustice and his opposition to totalitarianism. He is also well known for his interest in the power of language in politics and in shaping how we view the world. He died from tuberculosis at the age of forty-six.

BOOK 3:

THE MURDER Of ROGER ACKROYD
BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
May
14, 2007
    To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
    Dear Mr. Harper,
    What is there not to like about Agatha Christie? Her books are a guilty pleasure; who would have thought that murder could be so delightful? I’ve selected
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
for you. Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective, has rather incongruously chosen to retire to the village of King’s Abbot to grow vegetable marrows. But his gardening plans are upset by a shocking murder. Who could have done it? The circumstances are so peculiar.…
    One of the great qualities of Agatha Christie (funny how she’s never referred to simply as “Christie”) is that ambition and talent were perfectly matched. In over eighty novels, she delivered exactly what she promised. To do that in literature requires, I think, not only talent and a sound knowledge of one’s form but also a good degree of self-knowledge. The result, besides a trail of bodies, is an artistic integrity that has endeared her to generations of readers.
    On page 38 I have highlighted a line on George Eliot that I liked: “That pen that George Eliot wrote
The Mill on the Floss
with—that sort of thing—well, it’s only just a pen after all. If you’re really keen on George Eliot, why not get
The Mill on the Floss
in a cheap edition and read it?”
    You might have noticed that I have been sending you used books. I have done this not to save money, but to make a point, which is that a used book, unlike a used car, hasn’t lost any of its initial value. A good story rolls off the lot into the hands of its new reader as smoothly as the day it was written.
    And there’s another reason for these used paperbacks that never cost much even when new: I like the idea of holding a book that someone else has held, of eyes running over lines that have already seen the light of other eyes. That, in one image, is the community of readers, is the communion of literature.
    I was in Ottawa recently and while I was there I happened to visit Laurier House, where two of your most illustrious predecessors lived and worked: Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King. It’s an impressive mansion, with dark panelling, rich carpets, imposing furniture and a hidden elevator. What a perfect setting for an Agatha Christie murder mystery, I thought, which accounts for the book now in your hands.
    Did you know that both Laurier and King were voracious readers? I include photographs I took of King’s library, which was also where he worked, getting Canada through the Depression and the Second World War and building the foundations of our enviable social welfare system. Remarkable the range and number of books he read, including one that I love, one of the greatest books ever written, Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. There was the complete Kipling, too, and all of Shakespeare. A two-volume biography of Louis Pasteur. Books on art. Shelf after shelf of the most varied histories and biographies. There were even what looked like self-help books to do with body and health. Truly a striking library. And let’s not forget the piano.
    Laurier, who made a country out of an independent colony,