canada reads

Been listening to the Canada Reads discussion on CBC Radio this week. I won’t recap the plots of all the novels; if you’re not familiar with them, you can learn more by going to this webpage and clicking on the book covers.

I enjoy hearing how others were affected by the books, and what they thought of them. But here’s what I would say if I was on the panel:

1. The Outlander, by Gil Adamson, was a book that I read through to the end because I wanted to see what would happen, but I never found it believable. Every time the fleeing widow was near death from exposure in the Rocky Mountains, some unlikely saviour came out of nowhere to lift her from its nasty jaws – usually it was a man who came to her rescue, naturally. I never understood why she had murdered her husband; yes, he’d been cheating on her, but the story never showed her getting angry enough to commit a crime of passion. I didn't buy it.
2. Mercy Among the Children, by David Adams Richards. I forced myself to read half this book and then skimmed the rest, because the father's and mother's characters were so helpless and accepting of their mistreatment that it was depressing. Even Gandhi, the great passivist, was more assertive than these self-effacing folks. All the characters in the book seemed to me like shadows; they were either so pathetic and weak, or so pathetic and mean, or so pathetic and misguided, that they didn't seem real. I didn't believe any of them were as gentle or as rotten as the author drew them.
3. Fruit, by Brian Francis, is another one that I couldn’t get my teeth into. It wasn’t because the kid had talking nipples, which is a catchy gimmick actually and I liked that absurdity. It was because I’m 50 and the kid’s experiences didn’t have anything to offer me at this stage of my life. As a glimpse into a gay teenager’s awkwardness and insecurity and dreams it kept my interest for about two chapters, and then I didn’t care anymore and set it aside.
4. The Fat Lady Next Door is Pregnant, by Michel Tremblay. Yet another story that didn’t grab and hold my attention. The characters, and there were plenty of them, were full of life but I wasn’t allowed to know any of them well enough to care what they were going to do on the day depicted in the novel. I read a couple chapters and again, indifferent, returned it to the library.
5. The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill. This one I’ve been staying awake late at night to read “just one more chapter” of, not because I identify with or care about the main character herself but because her story plays out in a historically accurate setting and the author’s made the tragic lives of black slaves come to life for me in all their horror.

I’m going to sound like a Scrooge here, but I wouldn’t recommend any of these books to all of Canada. Not one excited me. Nope. Three out of five of them were returned unread to the library, because there are too many more compelling books out there and too little time in this reader’s life to find and read them all. I'm not saying they weren't well written; just that none of them spoke to me.