Father’s Day 2023 Reading List: As Seen on CTV
Father’s Day is around the corner! Here are eight books to gift the father figure in your life, as shared on CTV Your Morning June 13, 2023. Half are books to read with Dad, and the other half are books Dad can enjoy on his own!
You can watch the segment online starting at the 1:54:31 mark.
Picture Books to Share With Dad
A lot of board books or books for the very young feature Mom, but in the very cute Grumble Yawn, it is Dad who is takes centre stage for that sometimes fraught daily ritual- bedtime. Told entirely in sound effects, this is a fun book to read aloud and invites lots of giggles. Spoiler alert- everyone gets to bed eventually. Kunoichi Bunny is a wordless story about the adventures of a stuffed bunny. The word Kunoichi roughly translates to female ninja, and this bunny and its child stealthily come to the rescue of many unsuspecting citizens during the day, but even ninja bunnies need baths and goodnight kisses, in which case it’s Dad to the rescue! Father’s Day can be a multigenerational celebration and My Ittu: The Biggest, Best Grandpa is a loving ode to a child’s Ittu (a short form of an Inuktitut word that means ‘big grandpa.’). Grandpa is the biggest, strongest, fastest grandpa in the world- but more important is how much he loves his grandchildren. In the magnificently-titled My Cat Looks Like My Dad, a child compares their father to their cat—they both like naps, they both have orange hair, and they are both very lovable. Silly and sweet but never saccharine.
Books for Dad
Sundays is a collection of fifty-two breakfast recipes introduced with fun facts and anecdotes about Mark Pupo’s family, including their adoption journey and how cooking was an activity that brought him closer to his neurodivergent son. For mystery lovers, Closer by Sea is a debut novel about a boy and his friends who get caught up in a suspicious disappearance in their small fishing town in 1990s Newfoundland. Even though the mystery is a driving force in the plot, the book is also a coming-of-age novel and is being heralded as ‘a Canadian Stand By Me.’ The Outsider is a portrait of a fascinating man named Dag Aabye who has had a sort of Forrest Gump-style life that took him around the world and included stints working in iconic movies like Goldfinger and becoming the world’s first extreme skier before eventually retreating to live off the grid in the Canadian wilderness, emerging only to compete in extreme marathons called Death Races. And finally, the biography of a man so iconic there is no need to put a title on his cover: LeBron is a definitive, in-depth portrait of one of the greatest basketball players of all-time. Even the most diehard LeBron James fans will learn something new in this book, and if this is your first introduction to LeBron, you’re in for a treat.