After digging through my shelfs I have now picked the first book and along with that the first country to read for my 2010 reading challenge. The book I ended up picking was a Margaret Atwood (born Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) book I picked up on a sale couple of years ago.
I have read two of her books before. The Handmaid’s Tale which I loved and The Blind Assassin which I thought was ok. The book I will read now is Oryx and Crake. Both Oryx and Crake and Handmaid’s tale are dystopian science fiction or as Atwood herself prefers to call them Speculative Fiction. I tend to like those.
I haven’t read many Canadian authors before but I have read one quite extensively. And my first literary crush was actually Canadian! Now we will see if anyone has been paying close enough attention to know who that is and get a point?
Despite having read some Canadian books before I really know very little about it. Here in Europe we tend to lump Canadians together with their neighbor Americans with a little footnote that they are slightly more sensible when it comes to health care and gun control. Oryx and Crake might not be the best book to learn about Canada but maybe I can read a little on the side. And who knows, maybe this gives me an excuse to go and buy that ridiculously expensive maple syrup I have been eyeballing in the store for a while but found no good excuse for buying.
The sad thing is that ever since I picked the book I have been humming a certain Southpark song…
Gilbert Blythe, who else;)?
Absolutely! You win the first point
As for lumping, I’m quite sure a number of people in North America may lump together a whole slew of European countries so why should we try our outmost to be more correct?
Very true. Everyone does it but people always seem to get very offended when they get lumped even if they do the same themselves. We should just accept the fact that not everyone can know everything.