Canada Reads is an annual event on CBC Radio. Part book club, part reality show, the series selects five books each year and has different famous Canadians defend them in a week of debates. Each day, one book is voted off the list, until only one book remains on the final day of the event.

At first, this was all in fun. However, people noticed that the nominated books had sales bumps in the month before the annual event (Volkswagen Blues, which usually sells around 200 copies a year, sold 7,500 copies when it was nominated in 2005), and each year's winning book got a larger sales bump just after the contest (Next Episode sold 18,500 copies in 2003) ... so this friendly little book club has become Serious Business in Canada. In some cases (such as King Leary), an out-of-print book is reprinted after being nominated for Canada Reads because the publisher suddenly has guaranteed sales for it.

A French version, Le combat des livres, ran from 2004 to 2014. It was revived in 2018 as Le combat national des livres (with Katherena Vermette's Ligne brisée winning the competition) and has continued annually since then. As of 2020, only The Book of Negroes has won both the English and French contests.

The books that are being debated in the week of July 20-23, 2020, and their defenders, are:

  • Radicalized by Cory Doctorow, defended by Akil Augustine - voted off on Monday[1]
  • From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle, defended by George Canyon - voted off on Tuesday
  • Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles, defended by Alayna Fender - voted off on Wednesday
  • Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson, defended by Kaniehtiio Horn - voted off on Thursday
  • We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib, defended by Amanda Brugel - The winner!
Tropes used in Canada Reads include:
  • Award Snub: Margaret Atwood has been nominated six times (three in the English competition, three in the French competition), but has never won.
  • Colbert Bump: If a book wins, watch it go out of stock at bookstores in Canada. Quickly.
  • Product Placement: Played With, because playing this trope straight is frowned upon by the CBC. The books that are up for discussion and elimination are definitely products, but the defenders choose them from a list provided by the CBC, not by the publishers.
  • There Can Be Only One: As much as the defenders might like some or all of the books, only one book each year can be named the book that Canada reads.
  • Voted Off the Island: Or, in this case, off the bookshelf. One book is eliminated each day by a vote of all five of the books' defenders.
  • X Meets Y: Your friendly neighbourhood book club meets Survivor

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  1. ↑ Not a surprise; short-story collections usually end up being voted off first.
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