8 books that Canada Reads panellist Akil Augustine loved reading
Born in Trinidad and Tobago to a Rastafarian father and Roman Catholic mother, the Toronto-based Akil Augustine is a TV personality, public speaker and the host of Jurassic Park, the Toronto Raptors's public fan zone.
Augustine's relationship with books revolves around a love of writing style and a thirst for knowledge above all, he told CBC Books.
"I seek out information to put into my stories. I have a thirst for knowledge and I'm a storyteller," he said.
Augustine is defending Radicalized on Canada Reads 2020.
Canada Reads 2020 will take place July 20-23.
Here are eight books Augustine loved reading.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
"I was born in Trinidad. I moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., and I didn't grow up with my parents after the age of seven. But my dad was a black nationalist in Trinidad. He was involved in the black liberation and consciousness movements at the time. And for me, when the Malcolm X movie came out, my interest was piqued.
Malcolm X was black, a bit anti-establishment, had his own ideas and was part of a fringe religious group, which I kind of identified with knowing what I knew about my father.- Akil Augustine
"Malcolm X was a kind of father figure type for me. I didn't realize his history. Director Spike Lee does a great job with the movie, but for some reason the book hit me differently. It affected me more than the movie did. That was the first time that I had a book that I resonated with. In high school, we read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and other Canadian novels that I couldn't really identify with.
"Malcolm X was black, a bit anti-establishment, had his own ideas and was part of a fringe religious group, which I identified with knowing what I knew about my father. I was at an age when you rebel — you're fighting to make your own mark on the world.
"So it felt like the perfect storm of things swirling around me when I read this book."
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
"This book was a big one for me. It was huge. I was always into mysticism and esotericism. A lot of what we understand about spiritual practices nowadays is a lot about storytelling. It's all storytelling — a lot of history, culture and tradition. What Eckhart did with this book was establish a very grounded practice. It was spiritual.
A lot of what we understand about spiritual practices nowadays is a lot about storytelling.- Akil Augustine
"He didn't refer to it as spiritual, but it was spiritual for me. I consider myself as a doer and action-oriented. I love the philosophizing and the talking about religion and stuff, but I think that it was more important to have an actual tangible practice. There were some insights in there that I'd never heard before as a man that I thought were very powerful."
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
"This book is heavy! I don't read novels a lot. I'm very much into textbooks, studies and things of that nature. I really like practice. I like things that I could take it in and involve into my life. This book showed me how good a novel can be.
"It's supposed to be loosely autobiographical. I have a hard time believing that. But the book starts off with this guy — he's from New Zealand — and he's a petty criminal and drug addict. He gets sentenced to jail for about 25 years or more. He's really not happy about it.
I like things that I could take it in and involve into my life. This book showed me how good a novel can be.- Akil Augustine
"An opportunity arises to escape and he does so with a couple of other inmates. When they break out, they obviously can't go anywhere in New Zealand because of their crimes and what they've done. So he decides to move the slums of India.
"It's absolutely epic journey as an outsider to that country. When I was reading the book, I could just see everything that was happening. The author just does such a great job of taking me into the slums of India."
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
"The important takeaway from this book for me was to leave spaces in your relationships. The book is written very poetically. I'm a huge fan of poetry and the style of writing appealed to me.
The important takeaway from this book for me was to leave spaces in your relationships.- Akil Augustine
"What he says about having space between you and the people closest to you so you can be an individual, that was something that was important and resonated to me.
"It put some stuff that happened in my own life into context."
Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza
"This author is amazing. I'm a lot about spiritual practice. Just like Eckhart Tolle, Dispenza demystifies a lot of the practices — he talks a lot of manifestations of attractions. He gets into brain scans and he's professionally a chiropractor who broke his body in an marathon accident. His entire spine was finished and he somehow, in what they call spontaneous remission, fixed his back.
He talks about the placebo effect and the power of the mind over the body.- Akil Augustine
"So he began studying spontaneous remissions and gained a lot of insight from it. He talks about the placebo effect and the power of the mind over the body. He adds a lot of practice to what the spiritual teachers were talking about — he demystifies it and takes out a lot of the 'woo-woo' to add a bit more science to it."
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
"Funniest book ever written. The phrase 'Catch-22' didn't even exist before this book. It wasn't supposed to have that title — and now we all know the term. That shows how significant this book was. I always wondered why and how the world got to the point of having the First and Second World Wars — to where we were about to blow the whole thing up.
This book is a comedic satire but gives you insight into how preposterous some of the things society has asked young men to do.- Akil Augustine
"I've been a bit of a student of the First and Second World Wars. This book is a comedic satire but gives you insight into how preposterous some of the things society has asked young men to do were."
12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
"It's an amazing book. I once did an Instagram post about Jordan Peterson — and people went nuts. People commented why I, as a black man, would make a post about him. It was so jarring and in the social media world, you're scared of 'cancel culture' and people not liking what you like.
"I actually took the post down, which is probably one of the things I'm ashamed of as an adult — I got bullied by people who think they have positive intentions. Whether you agree with Peterson or not, he's articulating them well and putting himself out there to defend his positions.
It's an amazing book. I once did an Instagram post about Jordan Peterson — and people went nuts.- Akil Augustine
"He's not stopping anyone else from having the opportunity to say what they want to say. It's so crazy that people say he's bad for society.
"What people are trying to do is kill freedom of speech for him while championing their own freedom of speech. It just seems so hypocritical that you want to be heard so much but the second someone says something you don't like, you want to bury this person. But that's the exact same thing you're fighting.
"He is, to me, probably the most important intellectual of our time. Not necessarily because of what he's saying but because of what he's doing. He's put himself at the forefront, he's putting himself out there. He's going on shows where the people don't like him, he's going to the places where people don't like him, he's standing up to protesters and to people who had no idea what he's about.
"He's giving them that opportunity and he's allowing them to use him as a kind of beating stick. It's tremendous what he's doing because he's done tremendous harm to himself. People don't understand that you don't need to agree with people — but people need to be able to be themselves.
"I think rules in this book are very counterintuitive. But if you really sit and think about them, they're fucking brilliant."
The Holy Bible
"When I moved from Brooklyn to Toronto, I lived with my aunt. She's a very staunch Roman Catholic woman. So she would make me kneel down in front of the bed every single night and read the Bible. That's how I learned to read from the age of nine to about Grade 11. I'm serious. There'd be nights where I would go to the school dance but I had to be home by 10 because that's when she went to bed.
"The Bible taught me how to read and I've read it thousands of times. It's impossible for this book to not have had a longstanding impact on my life. The story of Jesus Christ is the story of what we believe to be the highest man to have walked the earth so far. He's the person that we believe embodies the Christ consciousness the most.
The Bible taught me how to read and I've read it thousands of times. It's impossible for this book to not have had a longstanding impact on my life.- Akil Augustine
"This book has shaped the planet. I'm not a fan of how it shaped the planet — I'm not a fan of missioning — but I do know that the story of Jesus Christ has played a huge role in crafting the world that we're on right now."
Akil Augustine's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
The Canada Reads 2020 contenders
- Alayna Fender defending Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
- Akil Augustine defending Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
- Amanda Brugel defending We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib
- Kaniehtiio Horn defending Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson
- George Canyon defending From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle
