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CanLit Canon Review #7: Morley Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. Morley Callaghan’s fourth novel, Such Is My Beloved, was published in 1934, and it’s the first of the books in the canon that feels modern. There’s a Chinese restaurant, a completely un-CanLit lack of…
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CanLit Canon Review #6: Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada, published in 1930, is an indispensable record of the fur trade and early European-Aboriginal relations, but it is also a brutal and exhausting test of endurance. You…
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CanLit Canon Review #5: Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. No one talks about Mazo de la Roche anymore, but her 16-part series, which chronicled the doings of the Whiteoak family, was popular in its time. So popular, in fact, that a neighbourhood and…
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CanLit Canon Review #4: Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. Maria Chapdelaine, written by Louis Hémon and translated from French by W. H. Blake, is the book we all should have read in high school instead of Pride and Prejudice. While both novels deal…
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CanLit Canon Review #3: Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. We’re told that Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, published in 1912, represents the pinnacle of literary mirth, and that Stephen Leacock, the author, is the patron saint of English Canadian humour. He was,…
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CanLit Canon Review #2: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that have shaped this country. From its very first sentence, which is 148 words long and covers, in part, the evolution of a local stream, Anne of Green Gables is a charming novel, but in an excruciatingly bland…
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CanLit Canon Review #1: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that have shaped this country. Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush is a memoir, written as an attempt to enlighten her people back home in the motherland to the terrible weather and accommodations in British North America.…