On the Night Table of Victor Rabinovitch

The Leaning Tower of Pisa and my night table are similar. Books, magazines, and newspaper articles downloaded from around the world are piled high, defying gravity, waiting to be read.

Recently, I celebrated the conclusion of my museum and public service career with the luxury of a mystery, Bury your Dead by Louise Penny. This is a light story — no bleak Swedish angst — that places a historical puzzle into modern Quebec City. Local cops chase criminals, consume delicious meals, and also show that combining history and fiction can be fun.

Lower in the pile are two books on the politics and dynamics of Arctic exploration. I just reread Ken McGoogan’s Fatal Passage, which is a fine account of John Rae’s feats of northern travel. Rae’s work has been largely unappreciated, in part because of Lady Franklin’s nasty slanders from long ago. Interpersonal conflicts also figure in Through Darkening Spectacles, a biographical memoir of the great anthropologist Diamond Jenness. The author, Stuart Jenness, brings to light his father’s contributions to world knowledge, notably in northern Canadian ethnography.

And then there are the magazines. The Queen’s Quarterly, Canada’s History, The Walrus, a few Maclean’s issues, the Literary Review of Canada, the New York Times Book Review — I read items from them daily.

On the floor beside my bed are my next big reads. Roy Macgregor’s Northern Light and Ross King’s Defiant Spirits both deal with a vibrant period when some artists set out to create a uniquely Canadian style of visual expression. These painters encountered controversies, enduring success, and a mysterious death. Reading history like this — whether cultural, social, political, or military — is a source of pleasure for me and part of the quest to understand Canadian identity.

Victor Rabinovitch, a fellow at the Queen’s School of Policy Studies, recently completed 11 years as the CEO of the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the War Museum.