Tell any member of the reading public beyond our borders we have a game show about books, and they’ll be agog. On Canada Reads, five defenders debate five books, voting off one title at a time, until the final book wins. It’s a reality show and it grabs eyes your fave lit journal never will. In this economy, that matters more than ever.
Books take years to write, and days to go stale. Once they hit the shelves, 95 per cent of books have around 14 days to get big on booktok/stagram. (Good luck getting the book reviewed when nearly no outlets run reviews anymore.) After that, the chance of finding a readership plummets. For many, the only saviour is a prize nomination, and Canada Reads’ criteria is more inclusive than most, even allowing backlist books back into the light.
But what makes Canada Reads great is also a liability. Just like Hell’s Kitchen, Canada Reads is based on strategy. Defenders form alliances and voting blocs. But when strategic voting overlaps with the discourse of pleasingness — a scourge across the book world, spend more than three minutes on Goodreads and you’ll see a book rated down for lacking “relatability” — and when the books in question are porting racialized experiences: things get ugly.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji recounted the dispiriting effect of Canada Reads 2014, when defender Donovan Bailey, himself an immigrant, said of Rawi Hage’s too-sad-to-get-out-of bed protagonist in Cockroach, “I don’t think it’s a true depiction of the typical immigrant experience. All immigrants — most immigrants — are here working 15 jobs …” The demand that diasporic stories be packed with jolly strivers reemerged in 2018. After Jeanne Beker called American War, Omar El-Akkad’s dystopia of forced migration “that book, that dark book,” she called Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves — an extended metaphor for residential schools — “a book that not everybody could take … this book instilled a kind of anxiety that could end up alienating certain people.”
That Canada Reads repeatedly sets up defenders to casually dismiss stories of racial trauma for lacking warm fuzzies, is high cringe. But this is a common sentiment. In the age of the cater-to-me algorithm, contemporary reading culture insists that our books (even or especially ones recounting marginalization) bend to our expectations, rather than us bending to them. Even when bending — freeing your mind — is the point of art.
But the sourness of it all was sweetened by Jully Black. When Black, also a 2018 defender, commented to the effect that readers can be “colonial” in their thinking, Beker asked why Black was attacking her. Black swept the legs. “I said nothing about Jeanne Beker … whatever you are feeling, take it to the altar, because I’m not the one responsible for your feelings.”
How Black didn’t win right then in sudden death is an unsolved Canadian broadcasting mystery.
You might think Canada Reads would only be upwards to justice from there. Yet, this very winter, the pleasingness card was played once again.
Speaking about Denison Avenue — Christina Wong and Daniel Innes’ novella about a Chinese bottle collector enduring the death of her husband and the erasure of her gentrifying Chinatown neighbourhood — Mirian Njoh said, “I found this book to be relentlessly gut-wrenching, honestly. … it raises more questions than it answers … it doesn’t even attempt to resolve any of the major themes it raises … it didn’t leave me as fulfilled as I would like my literature to.”
Canada Reads is a funny honour. Wong and Innes get spotlit, but the show chides their book for doing what it meant to do: disrupt the rhythms of Anglo storytelling tradition, from big ticket items like story arc and resolution, to the drawings which illustrate the prose but are also kept separate from it, to the unconventional direction and placement of the words on the page, to rendering Toisan in the Roman alphabet, so that the language is neither English nor itself. As we read it, we must enact what Scott McCloud calls “closure” — the work our minds do to “complete” an image when we can only see one part.
Denison Avenue asks us to attempt closure, because that’s what Cho Sum is doing: trying to hold together that which can’t be joined, then living in that gap. Wong and Innes’ go-for-broke choices are the only way to construct her interior world and all her unfinished heartbreaks.
Canada Reads gets us excited about books, but it’s unhappy marriage of lit prize and reality show makes it say books must be nice and neat, like a season of Love is Blind. This is a necessary evil that can’t be edited out (at least not by Canada Reads 2025). So, may I offer a solution?
For 2025, how about this theme: One book to challenge you? Or, let’s not mince words: One book to displease you. One book to confound you. One book to make you uneasy. Let the criteria mirror what great books can do.
This article appeared in the 2024 May/June issue.
