If there's anything folks love to do on the Internet, it's talk and argue, argue and talk. Anyone who spends enough time online will, whether they know it or not, eventually run into Godwin's Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

There are numerous variations and corollaries, and after eleven years of talking about books and with Book People, both in person and online (including an absolutely epic party last night, thrown by the one and only Julie Wilson), I've come up with a corollary of my own*. I hereby present you with August's Corollary to Godwin's Law:

As an English-language literary discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving William Shakespeare, James Joyce, or Ulysses approaches 1.

*What finally tipped the scales for formulating the Corollary was Perdita Felicien's appearance on Canada Reads.

I know I'm late to the party on this, but I wanted to wait until I'd posted my final review. Without further delay, let me congratulate Ray Smith and Dan Wells for Century's Canada Reads: Independently victory, and Kerry Clare for organizing the contest. Century was my favourite of the bunch, but it was a fine group of books, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting a chance to read along with others for the first time since I left university almost five years ago (actually, four years and eleven months to the day). I hope to get the chance to do something like this again sometime.

I chose Wild Geese as my final Canada Reads: Independently selection because it was the only one I'd already read, and therefore if I was late finishing it—and I was—I'd be able to vote on a winner knowing that I had read all the books. Summarizing Ostenso's novel is difficult without making it sound like a CanLit stereotype. It is, after all, a family drama set against the backdrop of a poor, isolated farming community on the windswept Manitoba plains. To say that it's about a young girl wanting to escape a domineering father, and a school teacher who falls in love with a young man with a shame hanging over his head so secret that even he doesn't know of it... well, we're into the realm of melodramatic stereotypes, into the realm of being force-fed books like Who Has Seen the Wind back in high school. Wild Geese has things in common with books like that, but it crackles with a tension all its own, and possesses a most unusual quality for a prairie novel: it is claustrophobic.

Caleb Gare is not a large man, nor is he particularly strong. The young Mark Jordan, raised as a city boy into a spiritual and intellectual life, is able to throw him around like a rag doll when he loses his temper. And yet Caleb has a grip over his family so tight that not only do they not hope for a better life, but hoping for a better life is something that wouldn't even occur to them. Caleb uses a passive-aggressive ruthlessness, and at times even direct threats, to keep many of the other local farmers similarly under his thumb (I find that in this way Wild Geese is a kind of cousin to the comedy of manners; it's most often through adroit manipulation of social pressures and conventions that Caleb achieves his goals). He cares only about himself and the land, a relationship that Ostenso describes with almost sexual fervor. Caleb is a shadow cast over the entire novel, his presence felt in every scene whether he's involved or not, and the whole of Wild Geese is fraught with the threat of violence or shame. All the open space, the infinite sky, it may as well not exist because of Caleb Gare. Even though I'd read the book before and knew how it would turn out, I was gripped by the tension.

There are problems with the novel that I didn't notice the first time I read it. There are quirks of diction and phrasing that smack of an era rather than an individual voice, and the romance between Lind Archer and Mark Jordan, though it works as a more abstract, spiritual foil for the very physical romance between Judith and Sven, sometimes swings too deeply into the territory of the chaste, bloodless kind of thing that the rest of the novel is written against. And since we're on influences, I can't speak to the accuracy of this, because I have not read them, but I was told in the Modern Canadian Literature class where I was first introduced to Wild Geese, that it's plotted in the pattern of the Icelandic Sagas. It would be fascinating to look at them side by side.

Wild Geese was my fifth and final selection for Canada Reads: Independently, and my thirteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Fear of Fighting, by Stacey May Fowles.

Congratulations to Nicolas Dickner, Lazer Lederhendler, and Michel Vézina for Nikolski's victory. I was rooting for Nikolski all along, but never did I actually believe that it would win. I almost don't know what to say, except that I think it was the most deserving title. It was beautifully translated, complex and inventive without being inaccessible, and full of life and fun even in its darker moments. Its truly a remarkable book, and I hope to read more of Dickner's work—and more French Canadian work, if this is in any way indicative of what's going on in that particular solitude—in the future.

I took the time to drop by the CBC chat again today, and found it smoother going. Perhaps yesterday was simply an off day. The discussion was not a bad one, in some ways better than what was going on in the official panel. If that's the sort of thing that interests you, you can read the full transcript online.

This is the first year that I've participated in Canada Reads, either reading the books or following the full broadcast. I had a great time with it, and if I'm able I'd like to do it again next year. It's going to be strange not discussing the same books with half the Internet all at once. I'm sure I'll find something to keep myself occupied.

Fall On Your Knees was voted out today! I wanted it to happen, and even I'm shocked. It never would have occurred to me that the panelists, these panelists anyway, would have been that strategic. Everybody in the studio and online were just as surprised as I was. Perdita Felicien was such a forceful advocate that I was worried her personality alone might carry the day.

Like Mr. Beattie I've found cause to slam my head against my desk more than once during this year's debates. Seeing Nikolski criticized for being too difficult and requiring the reader to do too much work, but also for being "thin" is what's given me my forehead welt. None of the panelists has mentioned Lazer Lederhendler's translation as the cause of the difficulty, and a good thing too, because it was absolutely amazing. It's not my idea of a difficult book, and part of me weeps that others find it so, but to hear it decried as too hard, and then almost in same breath as not substantial enough? My forehead and desk are now well known to one another. (And I can't help but think that when the panelists describe Nikolski as "thin", they mean that it isn't very earnest; all the other books, with the possible exception of Generation X, have had earnestness dripping from their ears.)

After every day's debate, the CBC holds a moderated chat on their website to discuss what was said. They've been held at 3pm, which is the single worst time of the day for me because of my work schedule, but I made a point of dropping in for the first half today. I think the chat is a great idea, but like a lot of these things run by large media agencies, they erred on the side of paranoia in their moderation rather than on the side of trust, and it wound up being mostly a way too chipper conversation between the two moderators. As a veteran of online chatting, I've seen it handled any number of ways. My preferred method is to put up clear rules of conduct and then allow folks to post freely, unless they say something that violates the rules, at which point moderation tactics like censoring or banning come into play. The CBC requires that every single comment be approved by a moderator, and only a handful make it through, which is pretty standard for media and "industry" moderated chats, but kind of disappointing nonetheless. The best way I've seen it handled so far is by the folks at The Agenda. What they do is require that every post be approved, but they approve all posts that do not contain offensive content, and eventually allow trusted commenters to post without restriction. In this way the show's viewers actually wind up doing most of the talking, with the moderators steering the discussion rather than dominating it. Things may not work the same way with a greater number of people in the chat room, but it feels more like participation rather than just observation.

With only one day left to go in Canada Reads, it's time to make predictions. I think Roland Pemberton will throw his lot in with Michel Vézina and the deserving Nikolski. Perdita Felicien, who has said more than once that she found Good to a Fault boring, will back The Jade Peony, leaving Simi Sara to cast the deciding ballot. I have little doubt that vote will go to Samantha Nutt and Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony, leaving Canada primed to read a dull book that's clearly Good For Us.

Generation X is off the island: quelle surprise (did I really make a Survivor reference? Ugh). Today was the day where they talked about "Canadianess", whatever that means. Is it a point of view? A setting? A tone? I feel ridiculous even posing those questions, because aside from having been asked hundreds, if not thousands of times, they seem like stand-ins for serious questions about the themes or quality of a book. If we can place it as "Canadian" then we can behave as though it has some kind of inherent value. It's our story, so therefore it's worth reading regardless. Blah. The panelists didn't go very far down that road, and though Jian Ghomeshi rightly asserted that it was Roland Pemberton who brought it up in the first place (come on, Jian, you would have brought it up if nobody else had), I'm glad that Pemberton also questioned using it as a yardstick.

Today's debate wasn't as robust as I would have liked, and even though it looks like Good to a Fault might be the next one thrown under the bus, Michel Vézina didn't take the opportunity to upsell the merits of Nikolski much beyond saying that it was the only book in the competition to have any French Canadian characters. That's true, but I've never believed that demographic balancing or any other kind of extra-literary issues are what makes for a good book. To me it's akin to reading a book because the author or the main character is of a particular gender or race or sexual orientation or whatever. If it's good, what does it matter?

Class came up as well, but no serious questions were asked. That's hardly surprising, of course. Canada Reads is hardly the forum for serious debate. It was too late for Generation X to come up, which was the book that really mattered to me in terms of class, but Good to a Fault and Fall On Your Knees (if I remember correctly) were both praised for dealing with the lives of poor folks. Nobody bothered to talk about whether or not the depictions were accurate or problematic in any way, but the whole show could have gone into discussing Good to a Fault if they had taken that route. I suppose I should feel glad the word "class" was even mentioned.

Even though I'm not rooting for her book, I'm looking forward to seeing what Perdita Felicien has to say. She could make things jump a little tomorrow if the other panelists finally realize that she's the one they have to beat.

We won't know for certain until tomorrow morning, of course, but it looks like Generation X is going to be the first book on the chopping block. Roland Pemberton didn't really do much to help himself, though. Despite coming second-last in my own lineup based on this year's contenders, I felt sorry for both Pemberton and Coupland that it had such a poor showing today (though admittedly, I would have been even harder on the book than the other panelists were). The Jade Peony is the weakest book on the list; while nobody's said anything negative about it, Samantha Nutt is the only one giving it any real attention at all. I think it's so unlikely a victor that continuing to ignore it may be the best way to keep it out of the race. Were I a panelist, Fall On Your Knees would have been my first target. Oprah selection aside, it's the book with the most advocates on the panel. I could see almost all the panelists throwing their weight behind it if their own books get voted out. Taking it down early would put all of their books on better footing.

Speaking of being hard on the books and other panelists, both the folks at the official CBC blog and Messrs. Beattie and Good made special mention of how frank and aggressive Perdita Felicien was, using words like "eviscerating" and "tore into". If what we saw today constitutes a "tearing into", then the men and women of Canadian letters might have the thinnest skins in all of creation. If those were strong opinions, I bet mine would have made somebody cry.

There's only one specific observation that several of the panelists made, which I saw echoed on Twitter, that I would like to address: that Generation X and Nikolski did not have strong characters, were not "about" characters. That's true of the first part of Generation X, but beyond that it's utter nonsense. In the second half of the book the characters come into their own, and though I agree with Vézina that they are—as I said in my own review—"brats", they were definitely fully-formed characters. And Nikolski has phenomenal characters. The themes of both books are pretty non-standard for CanLit, but they are both very character driven. What they are not driven by is throwing horrible shit at the characters over and over again until their lives fall apart, which seems to be what the panelists mean by being "about" characters.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Today on Twitter I posed what I thought was an interesting question, but I got no bites. What manner of beast is Canada Reads? I know it's meant to be all in good fun, but does that mean it isn't worth taking a closer look at it? Mr. Beattie thinks it is, and has once again enlisted Alex Good to help him provide commentary on the proceedings that goes a step beyond the Corky Sherwood coverage this sort of thing often attracts. Their banter is often the best coverage around. But it got me thinking: exactly what sort of journalism is Canada Reads, and book coverage in general? I've complained before that newspaper Books sections, and even the Ceeb's own offerings, can come off like extensions of a publisher's publicity department rather than a news gathering organization, recycling MadTV jokes about menstruation instead of covering real industry issues. All of it still, when we're lucky, shares space with real, in-depth critical assessments of books and authors. Are we dealing with entertainment journalism, like Ben Mulroney and Tanya Kim, or is it—or, I suppose, ought it be—cultural journalism, serious inquiry into the soul of a time, a place, or a people? Right now literary journalists seem to be bipolar on this issue.

The reason I bring this up is because today, in the very first day of the debates (aside from learning from Samantha Nutt that The Jade Peony is meant to be good for us—quite the shock there), Jian Ghomeshi seemed dismissive of the idea that a reader might have to, or God forbid even want to, do some work in order to enjoy a book. That's quintessential entertainment journalism, as far as I'm concerned. Not bad in and of itself, but not always good either. I'm with Harold Bloom in believing that "reading is the search for a difficult pleasure" (How to Read and Why), and I'm glad that Michel Vézina agrees. He took Ghomeshi to task, saying, "We're not watching TV here, we're reading books." Vézina is representing Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski, my own choice for this year's champion, were I given a say in the matter. Hearing him speak before the debates I was worried that his English wasn't going to be good enough to hold up in the debates. He's clearly an intelligent man with good ideas, but even in this officially bilingual country we sometimes find it second nature to look less favourably on an idea imperfectly expressed in our own language, regardless of its quality or the quality of the mind behind it.

I may or may not be posting about the debates every day; it will depend entirely on what's said. I do hope they will be lively.

Morality and religion are not the same thing. This strikes me as one of those things that ought to be taken for granted, but Good to a Fault reminded me that it isn't. Morality and ethics have caught my interest in the last couple of years beyond the every day attention I would give those issues just being a person in the world, so when I first heard the premise of Good to a Fault I thought it would be right up my alley. Serious moral inquiry from a Canadian author in a plausible real world situation. That's not exactly what I got.

Clara Purdy is a woman in her forties whose life stalled after her husband left her and then, later, she spent years caring for her mother when she died. Before that, she was at her father's bedside as he passed away from cancer. She does something in insurance that's so irrelevant it's not worth taking the time to go back and look it up, and she's a practicing but not exactly devout high church Anglican (so high church is Endicott's depiction of Anglicanism that this reviewer, raised in the Anglican church and son of a lay-preacher, finds it more than a little Roman, at times uncomfortably so). She's a comfortably middle-class nobody who's had disappointments she couldn't figure out how to come back from, who lives a dull life (though surrounded, it seems, by the most unflappable, giving friends and relatives the world has ever seen), knowing something is missing but not quite sure what. The Gage family are dirt-poor nomads, living out of their car and not really even making the best with what they have. Clayton is shiftless and aggressive, and Lorraine seems to have more or less given up, and though she loves her children fiercely, they've gone a touch wild on her, and Dolly seems more the mother at times. Clayton's mother is with them, and she's such a bitter, selfish old woman she's often more a caricature than a character. Clara and the Gages meet when she collides into their car turning left at an intersection. Nobody is seriously injured, but the car is a write-off and while at the hospital Lorraine is diagnosed with late stage cancer. Clara, looking as much to fill the void in her life as to take responsibility for her actions, lets the family stay with her, picking up all the bills no less.

At this point those of you who are interested in applied morality (not necessarily ethics, sorry—the best way I can think of to put the difference as I see it is actually to steal a line from the character Ducky on NCIS: the ethical man knows it's wrong to cheat on his wife; the moral man actually wouldn't) might be as excited as I was to see some challenging questions posed. That never really happened. Clayton takes off immediately, his mother is no help at all, and Clara Purdy finds herself sole caregiver to three children and a rickety elderly woman. There are some brief conversations with friends and family over whether the Gage family is her responsibility—they aren't, but some of their suffering is her fault, and to that extent I think she's right in that making amends in some way is her responsibility—but no serious argument is ever made against her plan, and she gets a lot of unconditional support. In fact, there's only two other serious questions that are really addressed in Good to a Fault, so far as I can tell, and only one of them is really worth asking, so of course it's the one given short shrift. We should talk about that one first.

Morality and religion are not the same thing. After Clara has been caring for the Gage family for some time a woman comes up to her in church and accuses her of being charitable publicly, to get something for herself. Good or bad, wrong or right, it's not what really matters. What matters is that this woman thinks it means her good works "don't count". Don't count? First, Clara isn't really doing anything publicly, so that's not even worth talking about, but second, what does "counting" mean in moral or ethical terms? Leaving aside questions about what is or is not a good act, are the positive outcomes of such an act negated if the act is performed for selfish reasons? In Clara's case her reasons were neither entirely selfish nor entirely selfless, but I'd say they started out more of the latter than the former. It's possible that the good acts are negated, but I very much doubt it. The children still have a place to live, food in their bellies, a safe place to sleep. So what then does it mean for something to "count"? There has to be, as there is for Clara and most of the other characters in the book—though, significantly, not the Gages—someone or something to weigh and measure, to make an accounting. There must, in short, be a God. Nobody ever explicitly states that there is no inherent virtue in any human activity, but it's telling that the characters who have no faith are also the characters who have no material success, who abandon their responsibilities, who have dirty children and unmade beds. (It pissed me off that, even compensating for Lorraine's cancer and Clara not working, the God-fearing, middle class Clara is far and away a better, more patient mother than Lorraine.)

The closest Good to a Fault ever comes to a genuine moral crisis is when Lorraine (and here I'm going to drop what the genre crown call "spoilers") recovers and is able to take back her children, Clara doesn't want to let them go. She goes as far as calling Community Services to make the case that the children would be better of with her. Whether or not that's true, and that really depends on your idea of what "better off" means, she comes to her senses at the last minute, and the two families have a colossal falling out. The heartbreak Clara feels is genuine, because she does eventually come to love the children, and that's the point when it becomes more about her than about the kids, or about doing something good, or taking responsibility for her actions, or any of it. And then there's a fucking interminable picnic, and the book is over, with few questions asked and none even half-assed answered.

Speaking of interminable, this book was way too fucking long. I know I said that about Fall on Your Knees, but I really should have saved that up for Good to a Fault. Pretty much all the thematic points were made in the first hundred pages, and all the rest of them in the last fifty or so. Endicott seems to be packing as much detail as possible into the scenes of Clara bonding with the children, so losing them will have a greater emotional impact. In that sense it's successful, because that moment and Clara falling apart afterward packs one hell of a punch. It just comes far too late to save the book from being a total slog, and it put off the issues at the core of the plot for far, far too long. Another whack or two from an editorial machete would have helped immeasurably. I really, really wanted to like this book, and I suppose I did, but I didn't like it as much as I had hoped.

Good to a Fault was my fifth and final selection for Canada Reads, and my twelfth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Wild Geese, by Martha Ostenso.

So it's hair, but it's shaped like a hat. I saw Carrie Snyder read at The Starlite in Waterloo a few years back, at the only UW alumni event I've ever attended. She shared the stage with George Elliott Clarke, Erik McCormack and a few other distinguished bookish folks from UW's past (perhaps even Evan Munday, though I honestly don't remember). She read "Tumbleweed," and I'm pretty sure part of one other story, and I have to be honest and say that I didn't think much of it. As I've written here before, I'm not very good at following fiction when it's read aloud. And really, the hair hat seemed kind of gimmicky. Every time I saw her book in the store (and I've actually seen it quite a bit; for a not-very-well-known first-time author, Penguin sure as hell got that book into stores) I walked past it thinking, maybe next time. I mean, it has French flaps and deckle edges both; it's practically begging for me to hate it.

I don't hate it. It was a pain in the ass to turn only one page at a time, and the weight of the flaps kept smacking it shut if I didn't hold the book just so, but I didn't hate it. I think I read all but the last two stories on the train back from Waterloo last night. For some reason, I tore through Hair Hat. It wasn't that I was so enthralled that I couldn't put it down, it was more a kind of puzzled curiosity. Carrie Snyder writes like she knows. Every sentence is confident, hardened, tempered, fully-formed and whole. There is no hesitation in these stories, and the weaknesses, where they exist, are all in the conception, the plan rather than the execution. Except of course for the hair hat itself, which was fucking ridiculous. If you've been reading my reviews of Robertson Davies' books over the last few months you'll know that I'm perfectly willing to accept outlandish literary conceits, but with Davies the whole world of the novel is in step with the conceit, with the satire, the bombast of it. I get the impression that Snyder's man with the hair hat is meant to be vaguely magical, like the blue mittens socks or the Vietnamese takeout in Rebecca Rosenblum's Once, but it was all wrong. Far too light for the tone of the stories, far too arbitrary seeming. Like Nikolski, it was interesting to see the connections, how the pieces fit together without the characters themselves being able to see it, but for quite a few of the stories ("Tumbleweed" and "Harassment," and "Third Dog" especially) the man and his hair felt tacked on. I can imagine Snyder thinking that she didn't have enough stories that included him to make Hair Hat a true story cycle, but that she also thought it would be too uneven if it wasn't a cycle. I personally think this book would have gotten a lot more attention if she had toned down her conceit a bit and let those other stories stand on their own. They could have been brilliant, and now they are merely good.

Snyder's greatest strength is in revealing family dynamics obliquely, usually through completely unrelated speech. Children argue about hot dogs, an aunt refuses to serve a snack between meals, and beneath it all we learn about abuse, fear, loneliness, self-hate, almost without seeing it happen. And then there's the goddamn hair hat, intruding, breaking apart the delicate emotional structures Snyder builds with her smooth, confident prose. The hair hat man even has his own story, which could have been quite poignant were it not completely undermined by the conceit Snyder has—quite literally—attached to him. Even the explanation makes no real sense. That one telling detail that could have been, should have been, magical takes all of Snyder's excellent craftsmanship and makes it farcical. Reading this book was like looking at a lovely Renaissance painting with a large gash running down the side of the canvas. It's still beautiful, but all your attention is taken up by the thing that spoils it.

Hair Hat was my fourth selection for Canada Reads: Independently, and my eleventh selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Good to a Fault, by Marina Endicott.