Hi Nerd is the Word, readers!
Have you heard the exciting news? CBC has announced the shortlist for their annual Canada Reads competition. Canada Reads is always an exhilarating time for a bookseller like me. We get lots of enthusiastic customers coming in for one, two, or even all five of the books on the shortlist! Some read all the books before the competition, while others wait until the debaters have made their case to start reading. Either way, it gets a lot of people excited about books. But not just any books. It gets people excited about Canadian books.
Here in Canada, most of the books that make it big are…American. There’s a lot of great books by Americans out there! But, its always nice to have a moment to celebrate the incredible books from our own Canadian writers. We’ve got such talent here in Canada, and the landscape of CanLit has been evolving a lot over the years. Just look at the shortlist this year! We’ve got a book about superhero henchmen, an ancestral trip to Taiwan, twins navigating intergenerational trauma, a secret sorceress, and a young two-spirit Indigenous man discovering himself. They encompass so much of the talent and the creativity of the CanLit scene.
This year’s shortlist books are vying for the title of “One Book to Transport Us” (along with Canada Reads 2021 Winner). I think we could all use a bit of fictional transportation after the year we’ve had! Check out the shortlist below:
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk
Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J. Lee
Fun fact: a fiction book has not won the Canada Reads title since 2017’s winner, Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis. The last three winners (Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness, Max Eisen’s By Chance Alone, and Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here, respectively) have been non-fiction, memoir-style books. Will a fiction book take the crown this year? Honestly, I’m not a great predictor at this kind of thing. But, I’ve noticed Two Trees Make a Forest has been getting a lot of buzz, so maybe the non-fiction trend will continue into 2021! Either way, I hope you join me in tuning into the Canada Reads event, starting March 8th.
Want more Canada Reads content? Join the staff at Indigo Pinecrest for their Pinecrest Reads the Canada Reads event! They’ll be talking about one of the shortlist books every Sunday until March 7th.
Happy (Canadian) Reading!
Image via www.cbc.ca
On top of being a top notch book expert, Ciara is also an expert bookseller and Lifestyle expert for Indigo.
