Canada Reads

"Canada's Annual Title Fight"

Canada Reads is an annual event on CBC Radio. Part book club, part reality show, the series selects five books each year and has different famous Canadians defend them in a week of debates. Each day, one book is voted off the list, until only one book remains on the final day of the event.

At first, this was all in fun... but then people noticed that the nominated books had sales bumps in the month before the annual event, and each year's winning book got a larger sales bump just after the contest ... so this friendly little book club has become Serious Business in Canada. In some cases (such as King Leary), an out-of-print book is reprinted after being nominated for Canada Reads because the publisher suddenly has guaranteed sales for it.

A French version, Le combat des livres, ran from 2004 to 2014. It was revived in 2018 as Le combat national des livres, with Katherena Vermette's Ligne brisée winning the competition.

The books that will (eventually) be debated in 2020, and their defenders, are:

  • Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles, defended by Alayna Fender
  • Radicalized by Cory Doctorow, defended by Akil Augustine
  • We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib, defended by Amanda Brugel
  • Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson, defended by Kaniehtiio Horn
  • From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle, defended by George Canyon
Tropes used in Canada Reads include:
  • Colbert Bump: If a book wins, watch it go out of stock at bookstores in Canada. Quickly.
  • Product Placement: Played With, because playing this trope straight is frowned upon by the CBC. The books that are up for discussion and elimination are definitely products, but the defenders choose them from a list provided by the CBC, not by the publishers.
  • There Can Be Only One: As much as the defenders might like some or all of the books, only one book each year can be named the book that Canada reads.
  • Voted Off the Island: Or, in this case, off the bookshelf. One book is eliminated each day by a vote of all of the books' defenders.
  • X Meets Y: Your friendly neighbourhood book club meets Survivor

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