But as for the Canada Reads book list: last year's winner (holocaust survivor Max Eisen's By Chance Alone) was a relevant personal story about historic events we all need to understand. Most people who survived the holocaust are unfortunately not surviving the relentless passage of time: they're old, so they're dying off. So, it's a matter of urgency that their memories be recorded.
This year's Canada Reads list seems repetitiously to gush out what doesn't need to be recorded -- or not recorded yet again. It seems like the list to miss. So what Can-Lit to read instead, for the CBC's stated goal of "bringing Canada into focus"?
Michael Layland's In Nature’s Realm: Early Naturalists Explore Vancouver Island 2019) is top of my list. I'd accompany it with an older book about early Ontario naturalists (and immigrant farmers in the bush), Charlotte Gray's Sisters in the Wilderness (1999), the sisters being Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.
And then I'd go back to those authors' own works: Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada, which Traill wrote in 1885 when at 83 she was the oldest writer then publishing in all the British dominions. That was when "Can-Lit" was truly breaking upon the wider world's literary horizon. Canada read Catharine Parr Traill for decades, but today the book trade ignores authors like her (i.e. "colonial").
More's the pity. We should not, in aid of re-focusing the public's attention, be forever hustled on to the next thing; let's re-read what's already good. For example Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (2016), is spritely and clever but overlooked, there being no television version of it. (Of course there was that play of which it's a modern version -- The Tempest, by that 16th century guy -- Shakespeare.)
As for new books, I'd go for the non-identitarian, unpretentious mysteries with plots, such as William Deverell's or Peter Robinson's latest -- not things that would ever turn up in Canada Reads, although they're what Canadians read.
We're better, I would venture to suggest, at non-fiction. It's interesting that looking at new fiction turns one back to the older titles, and then one wonders why the new are always a nine-day-wonder. Who remembers the Canada Reads winners from two, three, four years ago? But the old stuff which made its own way over time, without influencers and thought-engineers combatting each other on the radio, are still the most appealing.
