Canada Reads Longlist Performs Diversity, But Does the Shortlist Deliver?
Image courtesy of the CBC
In what now seems like a long time ago, the sphere of Canadian book scholars and readers on Twitter sparked to life last January with the release of the Canada Reads longlist. The community consensus was unanimous — this year’s longlist was an absolute banger. And, as a PhD student who studies book awards, it’s my job to interpret this list as a rich resource of coded information about the show’s goals as a reality television program, a publicly funded literacy movement, and a book award. Briefly postponed due to COVID-19, Canada Reads is now officially back up and running, and due to hit television and radio July 20-23 — making this a great time to return to the longlist and both celebrate and mourn the diversity of its pages.
For those who aren’t familiar, Canada Reads is a four-day spectacle which mixes a book club with a book prize, shoves it into the framework of Survivor, and airs it live on the CBC every March. Five books are defended by five celebrity panellists, and each day these judges vote to eliminate one of the books on the table until, at the end of the week, one is crowned the winner.
The fact that these judges have close to zero literary background both inhibits the prize and gives it some of its signature oomph. Watching the judges flail about as they try to articulate things they feel about the books without the terminology to properly express themselves is both entertaining and somehow endearing. Even more importantly, it models and publicizes the idea that anyone who loves books has a right to talk about them — this is, of course, where we can see the gentle machinations of CBC’s mandate to support literacy working in the background.
That said — and surprising no one — Canada Reads is problematic in the same way that many book prizes are. Despite increasingly diverse juries, prize culture still demonstrates sustained biases towards works written by white folks, straight folks, and English-speaking folks. This is hardly new and at this point it’s not even news.
If you want to gather the widest readership-slash-audience as possible for your book show, you’re likely to choose books you think your readership-slash-audience is going to root for without too much convincing. This means the list is dominated largely by books that are already in the mainstream which have won other awards previously or held spots on bestseller lists. Consequently, this does not usually include books by minoritized writers, books about difficult subjects such as immigration or trauma, books published by small presses, or books that take so-called strange forms such as poetry or graphic novels.
That said, the longlist for Canada Reads this year seems to depart from these biases in important ways: for instance, it has a wide selection of Indigenous literature, varied genres, and many small press titles. This diversity is heartening, although the Canada Reads longlist — and the longlist for any prize — can function as a performance of inclusivity, and these nods to inclusivity are often limited.
On one hand, Canada Reads celebrates diversity — and gains social and cultural clout by doing so — and yet simultaneously limits its support of this diversity largely to the longlist round where it does the least amount of good (in the form of benefits conferred upon nominated titles and authors such as marketing, publicity, and increased sales). As a result, every Canada Reads longlist — and the 2020 longlist in particular — gives us a wider view into how and why the show is produced and what its producers hope to accomplish both in terms of performing diversity and in actually being diverse.
Indigenous books in Canada Reads
Indigenous literature is important to read, especially if you’re a settler and living in Canada — a nation built on what is largely stolen and unceded land. Indigenous literature is also very good at this specific literary moment. Like, really good. A resurgence of Indigenous literary brilliance in the last five years has taken Canada and the world by storm, and my mind is boggled by every Canadian prize list (cough, the 2019 Giller, cough) which fails to nominate even a single Indigenous author.*
This is something Canada Reads struggles with, too. Last year the longlist only sported a single title by an Indigenous author, which failed to make it to the shortlist. Despite landing on roughly 80% of Canada Reads shortlists in the last decade, an Indigenous book has never won the competition (unless you count Joseph Boyden whom we all assumed was Indigenous at the time, but have since awkwardly realized is not actually Indigenous — so no, I don’t count Joseph Boyden).
This year’s Canada Reads longlist, however, has an especially strong and exciting showing of Indigenous literature. Four out of the fifteen longlisted titles were by Indigenous authors, spanning multiple genres. First and foremost, this demonstrates that Indigenous books are increasingly reaching a wider audience and gaining mass-market appeal in Canada — it also undeniably increased the chances of one of them making it to the shortlist. In fact, when the shortlist was announced at the end of January, it boasted two Indigenous books for only the second time ever in the contest’s history.
That said, a shrewd eye will note that Canada Reads hedged its bets: one of the shortlisted Indigenous books is a memoir — a Canada Reads staple — and the other is a past Giller shortlister, meaning it’s already proven its ability to gain mainstream attention. These are calculated choices and therefore a specifically purposeful kind of diversity — inclusions which are calculated to perform well in the marketplace.
Genre, book format, and Canada Reads
While Canada Reads typically sticks to mainstream fiction and memoir, this longlist boasts a book of poetry (one of only a handful over Canada Reads’ eighteen-year history) and a graphic novel-style memoir (the first graphic novel since 2011), as well as three works of science fiction and a YA novel. These are genres and formats that have appeared on Canada Reads before, but — like Indigenous works — have traditionally done poorly and are generally kicked out in the first or second round of debates. While the judges like to read, they don’t always know how to talk about forms and genres which fall a bit further from the mainstream. The last graphic novel to make it to the Canada Reads shortlist — Jeff Lemire’s Essex County in 2011 — was dismissed by one of the judges as a reading “shortcut” rather than reading, due to its “lack of words.”
The fact that the producers and organizers of Canada Reads continue placing these outliers on the longlist indicates a larger literary movement to bring graphic novels, poetry, YA, science fiction, short stories — and the list goes on — into the view of Canada’s casual reading public. But how much faith can we, the casual readers and viewers of Canada Reads, place in the show’s actual commitment to widen the frameworks and public perception of what constitutes popular or mainstream literature? For the 2020 iteration of Canada Reads, the answer appears to be at least a little: the release of the shortlist revealed two Indigenous books, for the first time ever. In some ways, this feels like the bare minimum and a milestone Canada Reads should have reached long ago — but on the other hand, I want to put my cynicism aside and celebrate it for the victory it is, no matter how small.
Who will be left standing?
Ultimately, by picking apart the longlist, we can begin to understand the logic that informs and constructs the shortlist and, by extension, Canada Reads as a whole. We see here an urge to be diverse not only in perspective but in genre as well. It’s crucial to remember this concept when watching and studying book awards: meritocracy is rarely simple and is often more akin to a puzzle pieced together in a backroom rather than cream rising to the top of a pail.
All book awards are, to one extent or another, invested in being entertaining and marketable. Since Canada Reads is quite literally inspired by Survivor, it makes sense that the outliers and diversity of the longlist serve to highlight the drama of the contest. It’s a question that has driven Survivor forward for more than twenty seasons — Can the underdogs make it to the next round?
Unfortunately, as in Survivor, this is all too rarely the case. This is exemplified by the 2020 shortlist, which intentionally includes the most marketable of the outliers while excluding those which may prove a harder sell to both general audiences and the often inexperienced jury members. The result: a beautifully diverse longlist, capable of drawing in even the most jaded Canada Reads cynic, and a shortlist which all too often falls tragically, well, short, especially in utilizing the tantalizing possibilities for diversity and complex literary conversation teased by its longlist counterpart.
*This is not unexpected for a nation which exists on the traditional, current, often-unceded land of Indigenous peoples. There is a definite irony in the contrast between the way Indigenous culture is taken up and celebrated by awards such as Canada Reads and the way Indigenous peoples are treated by the nation state of Canada in contexts such as the current conflicts over Wet’suet’en territory.
Essay
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July 18,
2020
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10-minute
read
Dessa Bayrock
lives in Ottawa with two cats and a variety of succulents, one of which is growing at a frankly alarming rate. She used to unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada, and is currently a PhD student in English, studying literary awards and the production of cultural value. Her poems have appeared in Funicular Magazine, PRISM, and Poetry Is Dead, among others. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or on Twitter at @yodessa.