How Quebec City made Canada Reads its own

Book lovers in Quebec City saw and heard a different "battle of the books" to the one CBC will air from March 26-29. Their mock Canada Reads debate took place at the Morrin Centre, the city's English-Language cultural centre, and consisted of writers, actors and educators defending the Canada Reads 2018 shortlisted books.

• Meet the Canada Reads 2018 contenders

CBC Breakaway's Saroja Coelho moderated the March 15 conversation as part of the Canada Reads 2018 regional events underway across the country. The five panellists covered a spectrum of subjects in their defence of each title, from climate change to family crises, in front of nearly 100 attendees. 

While the theme of Canada Reads 2018 is "the one book to open your eyes," the discussion at the Morrin Centre focused on "which book Canadians should be reading in 2018." 

• Still have Canada Reads books to get through? Our podcast has you covered.

Arts manager Bernard Gilbert saw the parallel between today's political climate and the setting of Omar El Akkad's American War. "Now we can write a book like this…we can set it in the near future [and] we don't have to hide [that] it is happening today." 

• Why Omar El Akkad's novel American War hit close to home for journalist Michelle Shephard

Second Language instructor and journalist Mary McCown read Craig Davidson's Precious Cargo as a story about learning from mistakes. "[Davidson] is thrust into a world he doesn't understand," she observed about the author's year driving a school bus for children with special needs. "He had that space to make mistakes...and that's where, I think, he grew the most."   

• Why Craig Davidson's Precious Cargo resonated with parents and students in northern Ontario

Huron-Wendat actor Charles Bender summarized Cherie Dimaline's dystopian The Marrow Thieves as a story of hope by saying, "basically, she is saying 'we've survived it before, we'll survive it again.' He added that, "everybody can connect to that, to saying, 'No! I need to survive because there is still something in my humanity, in my bones — in my very bones— that I can give to the planet, to the land, to the reason why I exist.'"

• The Marrow Thieves cover model Michael Snake shares how the book changed the way he sees himself

Novelist and essayist Neil Bissoondath remarked that the book he was defending, Sharon Bala's The Boat People, dared to look at the people behind bureaucracy as humans. "Nothing is simplistic in this," he mentioned, "we think of adjudicators of this kind as people who are trained — they know what they're doing, they know what they're looking for. And yet we forget sometimes that they're human beings as well with their own weaknesses and their own emotions."   

• Where does Sharon Bala write? 'A place that cannot be photographed'

Daniel Grenier, a Governor General's Literary Award-nominated novelist, had issues with the way Mark Sakamoto's Forgiveness is written, but appreciated the memoir's story. "The story is great," he admitted about the personal history of the Second World War, "the premise is completely interesting, completely fascinating!"

• Why Mark Sakamoto's father got emotional reading his son's memoir Forgiveness

McCown offered an overview of the evening's chat when she said, "perhaps the theme of all of these books is the difference between empathy and sympathy — we need to feel things, we need to understand what is happening with other people."

Highlights from the evening can be heard below.