Free 101 Letters to a Prime Minister by Yann Martel Page A

étaient aussi faciles à apprivoiser que les renards.”
    Mais nous sommes plutôt, nous Québécois, comme la fleur du Petit Prince, avec notre orgueil et nos quatre épines.
    Cordialement vôtre,
    Yann Martel
    [TRANSLATION]
    Dear Mr. Harper,
    You speak French. You’ve made great and fruitful efforts to learn the language since you became Prime Minister. You hope in this way to tame Quebeckers.
    In my last letter, I discussed the English language. So this time I’m sending you a book in French, one that is very well known. It’s
The Little Prince
, by the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. You perhaps read it during your French-language studies, but I’m certain it will still be of use to you, not only to help you maintain your French, but also to help you with Quebeckers, since
The Little Prince
is also the story of a taming, in this case of a fox.
    The fox teaches the Little Prince a very important life lesson, but I won’t divulge it here. I’ll leave it for you to find it.
    The vocabulary is simple, the scenes easy to understand, the moral obvious and endearing. It’s a Christian tale.
    You’ll sigh, “If only Quebeckers were so easy to tame.”
    But we Quebeckers are rather like the Little Prince’s flower, with our pride and our four thorns.
    Yours truly,
    Yann Martel
    A NTOINE DE S AINT-EXUPÉRY (1900–1944), a French novelist and artist, is most famous for his illustrated philosophical novella,
Le Petit Prince
(
The Little Prince
). This story is so beloved that Saint-Exupéry’s drawing of the Little Prince was printed on the French 50-franc note until the introduction of the euro. Saint-Exupéry was an aviator and, in most of his works, including
Night Flight
and
Wind, Sand and Stars
, he drew on his experiences as a pilot. He worked as a pilot for the postal service for years. During World War II, he flew reconnaissance missions for the Allies. On one of these flights he went missing and was presumed dead.

BOOK 15:

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT
BY JEANETTE WINTERSON
October
29, 2007
    To Stephen Harper,
From an English writer,
With best wishes,
Jeanette Winterson
 (Sent to you by a Canadian writer, Yann Martel)
    Dear Mr. Harper,
    The great thing about reading books is that it makes us better than cats. Cats are said to have nine lives. What is that compared to the girl, boy, man, woman who reads books? A book read is a life added to one’s own. So it takes only nine books to make cats look at you with envy.
    And I’m not talking here only of “good” books. Any book—trash to classic—makes us live the life of another person, injects us with the wisdom and folly of their years. When we’ve read the last page of a book, we know more, either in the form of raw knowledge—the name of a gun, perhaps—or in the form of greater understanding. The worth of these vicarious lives is not to be underestimated. There’s nothing sadder—or sometimes more dangerous—than the person who has lived only his or her single, narrow life, unenlightened by the experience, real or invented, of others.
    The book I am sending you today is a perfect instance of a story that offers you another life. It is a
Bildungsroman
(fromthe German, literally a “novel of education”), a novel that follows the moral development of its main character. Because it’s told in the first person, the reader can easily slip into the skin, see through the eyes, of the person speaking. Jeanette Winterson’s
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
is a brief 170 pages, but during those pages you become “Jeanette,” the main character. Jeanette is a young woman who lives in small-town England a few decades ago. Her mother loves the Lord in a big way, and so does Jeanette. But the problem is, the problem becomes, that Jeanette also loves women in a big way. And those two—loving the Lord and loving women when you are yourself a woman—are not compatible, at least according to some who love the Lord and take it upon themselves to