Canada Reads (and So Do Their Rock Stars)

For the last ten years, I've been comforted by the fact that when it was time for Granta to do their second survey of the Best Young American Novelists, I'd still (barely) make it under their 40-year-old cutoff line, and here they go and pull a switcheroo and lower the over-the-hill age to 35. What is this: Logan's Friggin' Run? Of course I didn't exactly help out on my end by writing an actual novel in the meantime, but still. Fair's fair, and I thought I still had a few months left.
So what's an American to do when things haven't gone his way? Move to Canada, where they have a thriving (if terminally underfunded) literary culture and where an American ex-pat like Carol Shields or William Gibson can hope to become a Canadian icon in time. Exhibit A (of many): the annual Canada Reads show on CBC Radio, which is pretty much the only successful translation of reality show gimmicks to the literary world. Every winter for the past five years, the CBC has convened five celebrity panelists, who each advocates for a book of their choice against the others for a week, during which four of the books are voted off the island until one remains, which is supposed to be "the book that Canada reads" that year. And it actually sort of works: the winner (even if it's an experimental Quebec separatist novel from the '70s, like 2003's winner, Hubert Aquin's Next Episode, or a completely forgotten 1928 classic from Newfoundland, like 2005's champ, Frank Parker Day's Rockbound) is a guaranteed national bestseller for months afterward. (All links here are to Amazon.com, if an edition is available, but if not to Amazon.ca.)
This year, as with every good reality show, there was a twist: an All-Star edition, with the celebs--a novelist, a journalist, and three musicians--whose choices won the first five competitions returning to battle again with a new group of books. And of all the many things that an American reader would be surprised and heartened to note about Canadian culture if they tuned in, this is perhaps the most impressive: their rock stars can read. The three smart musicians, Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo, and John K. Samson of the Weakerthans, have each won this competition once, and Samson won it again this year for his choice: Heather O'Neill's debut novel of Montreal street life, Lullabies for Little Criminals, which HarperCollins published to strong reviews here in the US last fall. (Meanwhile, O'Neill, like fellow Canadians David Rakoff, Jonathan Goldstein, and Paul Tough, is a regular contributor to NPR's This American Life. Shouldn't they start calling it This North American Life?)
This year's competition just ended today, but you can listen to all five days of discussion and read host Bill Richardson's daily blog (in which he complains, justifiably, about the word "blog"--I'm just glad he's never heard of "plog") on the show's site. Here are this year's failed finalists, in the order they were eliminated:

* Children of My Heart by Gabrielle Roy (a French-language classic set in Manitoba. Yes!)
* Natasha: And Other Stories by David Bezmozgis (many first appeared in The New Yorker and Harper's)
* The Song of Kahunsha by Anosh Irani (a young Vancouver writer's second novel, out this month in the US)
* Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor (another Vancouver writer, and one of my favorite novels from my years as our Canadian editor)

--Tom, Amazon Bookstore