I just discovered the Canadian Book Challenge. It looks like fun and best of all, the prizes include Kraft dinner or a hockey puck! I like the idea of reading one book from each province or territory over the next year. The Can Lit I most often read is from Ontario or Quebec and oh so urban. It would be good for me to read books set in the maritimes or prairies but it wouldn’t be a first. Around 1990 I took a course in Canadian Literature with Dennis Duffy. I thought it both ironic and fitting to be lectured on my country’s literature by an American Southerner who claimed he had “scraped the shit off [his] shoes,” when he came to the University of Toronto. Don’t you love a prof with a sense of humour? Lately I’ve heard him on the radio, talking about Canadian books and it just seems fitting. We are a nation of people from somewhere else. Even the First Nations crossed Beringia to get here.
I’m curious to know what books were covered in that course. Sounds interesting!
I don’t remember them all, naturally. The most memorable were:
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock and As for Me and My House by Sinclair Ross. I highly recommend the Leacock for small-town Ontario humour.
I also have a vague memory of studying the early and later Canadian poets. Archibald Lampman, Earl Birney etc. I’m more of a novel and short story person…
At some point I did enjoy Margaret Atwood’s poem, Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer.
There was also some Susanna Moodie (Roughing it in the Bush) plus Catherine Parr Trail if I remember correctly — but I probably don’t.
So funny about your Canadian Lit teacher. Looking forward to your list.
I woke my wife up with laughter one night after reading Leacock’s “My Financial Career”.
Yeah. I love that one too but that kind of humour is gone forever. Who respects and fears institutions that way anymore? What ever happened to formality? Modern adults dress like children and modern children dress like sexy teenagers. It’s a little too much sometimes but I still think it’s better than the mouse-inhabitied world Leacock was spoofing.