100 Novels that Make You Proud to be Canadian

Tonight, on CBC Radio's Cross Country Check-up, they will be compiling a list of the 100 novels that make us proud to be Canadian. Should be fun! I thought we could post what we thought of the show, the choices, our own choices here.

Based on the choices they've published online, I'm applying for American citizenship.

oh dear! I think there are some good choices there. I've read 67 of them.

Missing is, I think, The Dominion of Wyley McFadden by Scott Gardiner -- a book that only a Canadian could write.

Just for reference: http://www.cbc.ca/books/books100.html

thanx for the link.

There are some good choices. For example No Great Mischief is one of the great novels published anywhere. But there's also a great deal of good-for-you stuff, cleaving to the CBC's notion of novel as sociology. And then there's The Best Laid Plans, a disgrace that the CBC inexplicably continues to promote.

I haven't read The Dominion of Wylie McFadden, but I wouldn't be sorry to see a book like that on a list like this.

given it's a CBC list, I'm surprised all the Canada Reads winners are not on it. Next Episode by Hubert Aquin is the one that comes to mind.

given it's a CBC list, I'm surprised all the Canada Reads winners are not on it

Indeed! I've read 27 and own about another 10.

I've read 60 of them,!!! Yikes

I have read exactly half but have quite a few in the TBR pile.

me, too, I added quite a few to my wish list. I had thought of reading all of them, but I really don't like SF or murder mysteries.

Secret Daughter... Really? That's stretching cancon a bit and it wasn't even well written. Was it a novel? I thought it purported to be nonfiction. If you want to stretch cancon rules like that, how about The Shipping News a far better book written in Canada although the author is American.

Missing seem to be a lot of francophone writers in translation, especially when you consider the wealth of writing in French.

The missing book that stands out for me though is Blackstrap Hawco, by Kenneth J Harvey, the only book for which the compilers of the Globe and Mail's top Canadian book lists have ever apologized for omitting.

I agree about The Shipping News, but Random Passage by Bernice Morgan was even better.

One of the things that I love about lists like this is that they remind one of all the books that could have been on it if the list had been compiled by another set of readers. And the discussions that come out of the published version. sassylassy reminds me of the great gap that is where my Kenneth Harvey reading should be. And LynnB nudges me towards the copies of Bernice Morgan's novels which have been sitting around here for years and years, as yet unread.

Some of my favourites are missing too: Joan Barfoot's Critical Injuries, Bonnie Burnard's A Good House, Sinclair Ross' As for Me and My House, and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese.

But there are some too, which I was happy to find included, unexpectedly, like Mariko Tamaki's Skim and Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel.

Every one that I haven't already read is actually on my bookshelves, so I'm making a little reading project of reading the remainder. Not in a must-do-it-now way, but in my usual obsessy-but-still-kind-of-lazy way. (My list is here, if you're looking to copy the titles into a reading list as well.)

I consider myself well-read, but I've only read 22 of the books on the list. *blushes in shame*