Here are the 2010 contenders announced today for the CBC’s “Canada Reads” (with links to their location in the library, in case you’d like to borrow them):

• Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie Macdonald, will be defended by hurdler Perdita Felicien.

• Generation X, by Douglas Coupland, will be defended by rapper Cadence Weapon.

• Good to a Fault, by Marina Endicott, will be defended by broadcaster Simi Sara.

• The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy, will be defended by Dr. Samantha Nutt, founder of War Child Canada.

• Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner, will be defended by literary and cultural critic Michel Vézina.

In honour of UC History Week, here is a quotation from a famous novel which mentions University College:

“In the autumn of 1919 I entered University College, in the University of Toronto, as an honours student in history. I was not properly qualified, but five professors talked to me for an hour and decided to admit me based on some special ruling invoked on behalf of a number of men who had been abroad fighting.”
– Fifth Business / Robertson Davies (1970)

Charles Levi is giving a talk this evening, as part of UC History Week,  about the history of the UC Lit: “Politicians, Lawyers, Defrocked Priests and That Guy Who Shot His Leg Off: Secrets of the names on the JCR walls.”

If you’d like to read more, we have Charles Levi’s book about the UC Lit at Laidlaw Library: Comings and goings : university students in Canadian society, 1854-1973, as well as his PhD dissertation, Where the famous people were? : the origins, activities and future careers of student leaders at University College, Toronto, 1854-1973.

And if you’re interested in the history of UC and U of T, you might also want to read A not unsightly building : University College and its history, as well as the book by last night’s speaker: Martin Friedland’s The University of Toronto : a history (we have both at Laidlaw).

The Governor General’s Literary Awards were announced yesterday.  M.G. Vassanji won for his memoir A Place Within: Rediscovering India.  Kate Pullinger, who grew up in Canada and now lives in the U.K., won for her Victorian-era novel The Mistress of Nothing.  Kevin Loring won for his first ever play, Where the Blood Mixes (he’s also an accomplished actor). North Vancouver poet David Zieroth won for The Fly in Autumn.

Laidlaw Library has purchased all these books; here are links to the library catalogue:

• A Place Within: Rediscovering India / M.G. Vassanji
• The Mistress of Nothing / Kate Pullinger
• Where the Blood Mixes / Kevin Loring
• The Fly in Autumn / David Zieroth

If you’re looking for a book to mark Remembrance Day, I recommend Coventry, by Helen Humphreys.  It’s a fairly short novel about two women in the British city of Coventry and what happens to them and their loved ones during both World Wars.

Much of it takes place on the night in 1940 when Coventry sustained its worst bombing.  It gave me some sense of what it was like for civilians to live through such an attack.

A new British play, That Face, is on at the Berkeley Street Theatre until Nov. 21.  The playwright, Polly Stenham, was only twenty when the play premiered in London in 2007. Here’s an interesting Globe and Mail interview with the playwright.

If you’d like to read the play, we have it at Laidlaw Library.

This summer the American Psychological Association published the sixth edition of its popular Publication Manual, and it turns out to full of errors –  pretty shocking for a book which tells you how to get all the details and punctuation right when you’re compiling a bibliography.

After receiving a lot of criticism, the APA is doing a revised Second Printing and has apparently now agreed to give buyers of the error-ridden First Printing a replacement copy, starting Nov. 2.  (I will get a replacement for Laidlaw Library’s copy.)

In case you’re curious, the APA has posted a list of the the errors identified in the first printing.

The winner of this year’s Toronto Book Award is More, Austin Clarke’s novel about a single mother faced with the news that her son is involved in gang crime.

The Toronto Book Awards honours books that are “evocative of Toronto.”  The other finalists this year were Anthony De Sa’s novel Barnacle Love, Maggie Helwig’s novel Girls Fall Down, and two non-fiction books: Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City that Might Have Been, and In the Land of Long Fingernails: A Gravedigger’s Memoir.

Here are my favourites among the books I read this summer.  They would be good in any season, and all are available at Laidlaw Library.

Run, by Ann Patchett
A riveting family story set in Boston in the winter.  Except for a prologue and epilogue, it all takes place in one 24-hour period.

The Prairie Bridesmaid, by Daria Salamon
It feels like “chick lit” (first-person narrator with a group of women friends, self-deprecating humour, a focus on relationships).  But whereas a lot of chick lit seems to be about how a woman finds the man of her dreams, this book is about how a woman extricates herself from an emotionally abusive relationship with the man of her dreams.

Olive Kittredge, by Elizabeth Strout
Sad, memorable stories about different characters who all live in the same small town in Maine (I read it while I was in Maine). Olive Kitteridge is a difficult woman who appears in all the stories, sometimes as a central character, sometimes not. The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction.