I have now read four out of five Canada Reads 2013 novels. I am currently making my way through the last one. Here they are in the order I think they deserve the prize:

1. “Indian Horse” by Richard Wagamese. This is a story about an Ojibway boy who survives residential school. As the novel is about residential schools the subject matter is quite brutal. I am guessing that during Canada Reads people will argue that this novel is important for Canadians to read because of socio-political reasons. While these are certainly good reasons to read this novel, I would argue that this novel should be read because it is amazingly well written. The prose is sparse, clear and effective.

2. “February” by Lisa Moore. The story of a family whose father dies when an oil rig sinks off the coast of Newfoundland in the 80’s. The novel is a collection of vignettes of the family, mostly the mother, before the after the accident. The main story line follows the mother and eldest son as they enter new relationships in 2008. I really liked the story and I am looking forward to reading more by Lisa Moore, though I think she still has a bit more room to mature as a novelist. I found some of the prose choppy and some of the vignettes, particularly the ones about the son’s girlfriends master’s degree and the mother’s sister’s misadventures, to be a bit disconnected from the main narrative.

3. “Away” by Jane Urquhart. I have been looking forward to reading Jane Urquhart for a while and now I finally got around to it. I am a little bit disappointed because I really did not like this novel. It is about four generations of Irish Canadians starting just before the Potato Famine in Ireland and ending in present day Ontario. Quite opposite of “February”, I loved the prose but hated the point of the story. The images of rural Ireland and Canada in the 19th century were poignant and exciting and some of the characters were quite interesting. However, the concept of being “away”, treated with such precious care in the novel, is to me farcical at best and glorifying idleness of mind and abdication of responsibility at worst. While I fully support teenagers moping, even excessively, moping as a life pursuit of adults is not something I would look at with any sort of admiration and this is precisely what I got from this novel. If moping adults do not get on your nerves, you will enjoy this novel more than I did.

4. “The Age of Hope” by David Bergen. The novel follows a woman named Hope from when she finished high school in the mid 1940’s into her dotage in the 2010’s. She is a stereotypical suburban housewife spending most of her life in a small Manitoban Mennonite community. The novel is written well enough and I suppose it is very true to life. There is a hint in the novel that one of the woman’s children had written it and as such it is lacking a certain level of objectivity. My complaint of the novel is that Hope is miserable and it made me miserable to read about her life. Her negativity and unhappiness grated on me because she had no reason to be unhappy. She chose her path in life, got what she wanted to get, was as fortunate as any random Canadian and yet was constantly unhappy.

I did not include “The Two Solitudes” by Hugh MacLennan partially because I have not finished reading it and partially because I don’t think it fits the spirit of the “Canada Reads” prize. I love this show and concept because it gives people an opportunity to read novels they would not otherwise read. I had no intention of reading any of these authors save for Jane Urquhart and even so it is quite unlikely that I would have ever gotten around to reading her. By the same token, this show gives publicity to novels that deserve to be introduced to a larger audience. I have heard of “The Two Solitudes” a million times and the only reason I have not read it by now is because I skipped grade 8 where it was part of high school curriculum. The large publicity this novel already enjoys disqualifies it from me wishing it wins the prize. I will finish reading it though and will amend my opinion if I find that I absolutely love it. We’ll see.