I just discovered the
Canadian Book Challenge. It looks like fun and best of all, the prizes include Kraft dinner or a hockey puck! I like the idea of reading one book from each province or territory over the next year. The Can Lit I most often read is from Ontario or Quebec and oh so urban. It would be good for me to read books set in the maritimes or prairies but it wouldn't be a first. Around 1990 I took a course in Canadian Literature with Dennis Duffy. I thought it both ironic and fitting to be lectured on my country's literature by an American Southerner who claimed he had "scraped the shit off [his] shoes," when he came to the University of Toronto. Don't you love a prof with a sense of humour? Lately I've heard him on the radio, talking about Canadian books and it just seems fitting. We are a nation of people from somewhere else. Even the First Nations crossed
Beringia to get here.
