READING CANADA READS 2008

WRAP-UP

Best Panelist

Steven: Lisa Moore. She consistently had the most substantive things to say, and was always quick with a snappy comeback. Perhaps I gravitate towards her because she's a novelist and she was the one panelist to consistently engage the books on a literary level. Nevertheless, she was my fave.

Alex: I would pick Lisa Moore too, if only because it seemed like Ghomeshi was riding her a lot. She put up with it and didn't lose her cool.

Least Impressive Panelist

Alex: I thought all of the panelists did a good job. Radio isn't easy. But Steve MacLean has to take some lumps for his strange insistence on reading works of fiction so literally. It wasn't just that he didn't like talking cats or singing sheep or zombies. He even got upset that King Leary was smearing the memory of Francis "King" Clancy! His performance on Day Three was much better, but I thought it odd that his best moments came when he was talking about books other than Icefields.

As a close runner-up here I have to mention Zaib Shaikh. After starting out strong he really went downhill, at least from a strategic point of view. Why he didn't talk about Not Wanted on the Voyage as a warning about the dangers of fundamentalism, which was a gimme, is a mystery. Instead he got bogged down in an unwinnable argument with Moore over feminism in the book, and then talked about its environmental message. Finally, on the last day, with everything on the line, he chose to read a passage that he thought showed Noah in a better light! Instead of defending his book he was defending Noah! A virtually impossible task, I would have thought.

Steven: I liked Shaikh's dramatic reading, in part because he has a great radio voice (second only to Jemeni's on this year's panel), and in part because his training as an actor gave the reading real dramatic force. Yes, he was trying to highlight a passage that humanized Noah, but I don't necessarily see anything wrong with this, particularly given Moore's insistence on criticizing the book for its unidimensional, archetypal characters.

I agree with you, Alex, that the weakest panelist was Steve MacLean. You have to give him props for participating - he's an astronaut (and, as you reminded us yesterday, the only physicist on the panel), not a literary critic, so he was operating somewhat outside his comfort zone, which was a brave thing to do. However, his unwillingness to accept singing sheep in an obviously fantastical story like Not Wanted on the Voyage or zombies in what Jemeni rightly pointed out was a novel steeped in Afro-Caribbean religiosity proved a real stumbling block. If you can't make these imaginative leaps, books like Not Wanted on the Voyage and Brown Girl in the Ring will remain closed to you regardless of their other evident attributes.

Biggest Surprise

Steven: MacLean doing a complete 180 in the bottom half of the final show. After spending the entire week talking about how he had to remain true to his principles and vote against King Leary, his dramatic about-face was frankly inexplicable to me, unless he was voting strategically to get King Leary kicked off because he thought it was Icefields' biggest competition. His change of heart pains me even more because had he stuck to his guns, Not Wanted on the Voyage, which I liked more than King Leary, would have won.

Alex: If I pat myself on the back any more I'll probably throw my shoulder out, but after correctly predicting the first two books voted off and the ultimate winner, I have to ask myself "How much more right could I have been?" And I believe the answer (as Nigel Tufnel would put it) is "None." There weren't many surprises. Though my eyebrow did tremble upward just a bit at MacLean's switch in the final vote.

Weirdest Moment

Alex: Jemini lost me when she said that the magic elements in her book are part of an authentic religion and there is scientific evidence that people can be made to behave like zombies. At least I think that's what she was saying. This may be true, but . . . so what? I don't think there's any scientific evidence for seven-foot skeletons walking around in top hats or invisibility spells. It's as if Shaikh had tried to defend Not Wanted on the Voyage by offering scientific evidence of a great flood. Maybe she was trying to win over MacLean. But Brown Girl in the Ring is a science-fiction fantasy. I thought this was a crazy approach.  

Steven: I agree with you: that was kind of weird. But, to give Jemeni credit, I think her point was that there are elements of Brown Girl in the Ring that arise out of Afro-Caribbean religious experience, and that the other panelists' insistence on reading the book as a completely imaginative speculative fiction elided this aspect of the book. Fair enough.

For me, the strangest moment was Ghomeshi's inexplicable misunderstanding of Moore's comment that Hopkinson's book was the least well written and yet took her to a place she hadn't gone before. Somehow, Ghomeshi interpreted this as Moore saying that she thought Hopkinson evinced the best writing of the five books, even though Moore had been fairly explicit throughout in saying that Gallant was the best writer.

A close runner-up, and perhaps not a "weird" moment, so much as a baldly indefensible one, would be Bidini's assertion that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would have the same effect on a reader of Twain's era as it would on a modern-day reader.

Grading the Host

Alex: I'd give him a C+/B-. He kept things moving, but he didn't always seem to be on the same page as the panelists. As you noted Steve, he flubbed an exchange with Moore badly, and I thought picked on her a bit much. A number of the discussion topics he tossed out didn't go anywhere, and/or weren't worth pursuing in the first place. When he floated his David vs. Goliath idea at the end there was almost a revolt. But I guess it was his first year on the job, taking over from Bill Richardson. I'm sure he'll get better.

Steven: I'd be a bit more generous, giving him a B. It can't be easy to manage five disparate personalities, and I thought he hit the right combination of allowing a free-form discussion and keeping control of the proceedings. He did attempt to get some discussion going, but I think to a certain extent he was hampered by a panel that was a bit overly determined to remain congenial and polite at all costs. (The exception to this, as always, was Lisa Moore.) Given that this was his first year on the job, I thought he acquitted himself just fine, and he'll likely only improve as the years go by.