Canada Reads. final thoughts

   Canada Reads 2019

The Panel:

host Ali Hassan

Chuck Comeau

Lisa Ray

Ziya Tong

Yanic Truesdale

Joe Zee

   The panel this year was not as combative as other years.  In the past, there has been more talk about 'strategy' and sometimes it seemed that the panel wanted to get rid of the best book first so there was more chance for the book they were promoting.  That was irritating.  But this year, they appeared to honestly care about the best book winning.

  The theme this year was: "One Book to Move You".  Perhaps that is why the books were so sad and difficult to read.  The themes of the books were: war, mental illness, grief, racism, hate crimes, the holocaust, abandonment- you get the picture.

   It was even hard to listen to the trailers for the books.  The panel members were looking at issues that are disturbing in the world today and, of course, there are many such books.

   But only two of the books had any sense of hope, and they were the last two books to be voted out.  They were the two books that moved you without devastating you.  I would have been happy to see a tie between these two books- ""Homes" by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and "By Chance Alone" by Max Eisen. 

And the winner was..."By Chance Alone".

  Although I was not pleased with the choice of books, I did feel that the panel worked hard to promote Canadian books in a positive way.  They were supportive of each other and put a great deal of preparation into making the discussion interesting.  

Canada Reads, book 5: "Homes"

Abu Bakr Al Rabeeah

  This memoir "Homes" is the story of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, as told to his teacher Winnie Yeung, when Abu was 15 years old.
   It tells of a childhood spent in Syria, in a very tight extended family with much warmth and security. Many hours playing video games or soccer. However,  Abu was only 10 when civil war broke out.
  Most of the book is the description of the horrors of the war.  But Abu's family of 10 was eventually able to immigrate to Canada.
   Winnie Yeung did a great job of describing not only their time in Syria, but also the immigrant experience in Edmonton.

Canada Reads, book 4: "The Woo Woo"

  
  This is another book that brings out differing opinions.  I have just read three five-star reviews of this book that call it "darkly comedic", and they enjoyed it greatly.
   I thought it was a horrific story and I could not wait to finish it.
  The author, Lindsay Wong, writes about her childhood in Vancouver, where mental illness reigns supreme in her extended Chinese family!  Her grandmother is a paranoid schizophrenic.  There were 8 connected families (70 people) who all seem to be suffering with ghosts and demons possessing them (the Woo Woo).


Quotes:
  "In that moment I was very aware that my mother might not ever fully recover.  And I was scared that we were all going to be spastic, cosmic orphans, pathetic little planets spinning non-stop, if my father didn't pull himself together and teach us how to effectively orbit around our out-in-space mother."
   "I was beginning to realize that the madness in our DNA was a life-threatening disease, transmitted like a pesky airborne infection, attacking and mutating the pink and grey confetti cells of the brain."
  "We were a product of untreated mental illness that had escalated for generations".

Lindsay Wong

   


  There are 300 pages of descriptions of dysfunction that is extreme and bizarre.   Somehow, the author managed to graduate from Columbia University with an MFA and now is an author who has won many awards. 
  She always was afraid that she would follow her mother and grandmother in being taken over by ghosts and demons, but actually her sickness has been identified as "migraine-related vestibulopathy".