> PICK FOUR FOR FATHER’S DAY

Sometimes it’s easier to say things in a letter. Things we want to be remembered and pondered, wisdom that’s within easy reach in years to come. These three books I’ve read in the past year or so share some powerful lessons — and love — between dads and their children.

“I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to my Daughter,” by David Chariandy (McClelland & Stewart)

He’s written about family relationships before, most famously, perhaps, in his award-winning novel “Brother.” But this book is more intimately personal: it’s a letter to his daughter, Chloe, when she was 13. He began writing it after the 2016 election when his daughter started asked pointed questions about U.S. President Trump and racism. It’s also about his own childhood growing up in Scarborough and his marriage to a white woman. For any dad trying to explain today’s world to his daughter, this book will resonate.

“Between The World and Me,” TaNehisi Coates (Random House)

American writer James Baldwin famously wrote a letter to his nephew in 1962 talking about his future in a country still rife with terrible racism. In 2015, the Atlantic correspondent and prolific writer Ta-Nehisi Coates took that frame but wrote the letter to his son. In this small but powerful book, he examined how his son’s world was much different from Coates’ but also eerily similar. Powerful and relevant.

“Wisdom in Nonsense: Invaluable Lessons From My Father,” by Heather O’Neill (University of Alberta Press)

Not every dad lives up to an ideal. In this very slim volume — just 64 pages — from 2018, O’Neill presents the wisdom in 13 lessons that are, by turn, very funny and poignant. She says her father was an “asshole” — but, as with so many relationships, there was love and admiration mixed in there, too. Plus, you get O’Neill’s sublime writing: “Although he didn’t warn me about drug addicts, he spent plenty of time warning me about clowns.”

“The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” by Richard Flanagan (Vintage Books)

Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan’s father was an Australian prisoner of war who was forced to help build the Burma railway in the Second World War. This book, which won the Booker Prize in 2014, is Flanagan’s homage to his father and the men who were taken prisoner. It also looks to after the war, and to how one lives after surviving such a thing, about what it means to be a good man. It is also a powerful and exceptionally beautiful read.