Every year CBC’s Canada Reads hosts a “battle of the books,” where five celebrity panelists defend their favourite work of Canadian fiction. Over the course of three months, books will be eliminated one by one until one panelist triumphs with the book for Canada to read that year.
Want to be involved? This year, Canada Reads has opened up the selective process to the public. Throughout the month of October, YOU and your friends can vote for what you consider to be the ESSENTIAL CANADIAN BOOK OF THE DECADE! The top 40 choices will be put on a shortlist for the panelists to choose from. To make your recommendation fill out the online form here: http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/
Can’t decide? Here are some of our recommended titles:
The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman
"The Heart Specialist is an electrocardiogram of a novel. Claire Holden Rothman sensitively traces the peaks and valleys experienced by a woman breaking through the formidable gender barriers of early twentieth-century medicine. Her Dr. Agnes White is a fascinating character, an anomaly in her time, an authority on the human heart who knows so little of the workings of her own. I ached for her."
— Caroline Adderson, author of Pleased to Meet You
"It's hilarious and redemptive, brimming with revelation. Still Life With June is modern and urban without being too edgy for the masses. This book is highly recommended."
— The Edmonton Journal
"Beautifully written by this masterful storyteller, Oonagh draws us into a story of race and class, joy and sorrow, fear and newfound freedom writ large. The tale of Chauncey Taylor’s flight to freedom, his success in his barbering business in Upper Canada, and his love for his sharp-tongued Irish lass are painted with a fine hand, as are the underlying tensions of race and class that threaten their union."
— Karolyn Smardz Frost, author of I've Got a Home in Glory Land
Oodori by Darcy Tamayose
"Tamayose's prose brims with lyrical display ... We're offered fervid reminders of nature's beauty every few pages ... Odori is finally a war novel, its point to seek meaning amid chaos, to show the exquisite and eternal amid the blood and brutality and death. Yet where Tamayose truly excels, where her writing seizes you (well, me) in mind and heart, is where mortal truths insist on breaking through her gauzy curtain."
— The Globe and Mail
New Under the Sun by Kevin Major
“"[poses] a profound question that will leave readers wondering about race, history, legacy, and compromise ... a skilful work of fiction."
— Quill and Quire
Canada Reads 2011 will air in February 2011. Tune in to see if your title will be picked as the title for Canada to read!
