Canada Reads: Digging Through Old Notes Again
I am relaunching the membership site for the Institute for Applied Knowledge, and fiction is finally part of the plan for Bookish Notes. That search through old notes started this whole chain. I came across a Medium piece by Polski z Leo called I've Read Thousands of Books, These 15 Changed Me the Most, and one line about The Metamorphosis stopped me.
The writer's take was that Kafka's story is really asking what becomes of a relationship once one person stops being useful to the other, not simply a man waking up as an insect. That reframing sent me straight back to my review of the book.
Reading my old words pulled up a memory I had not visited in years. The review mentioned Canada Reads 2014, and that single line was enough to send me looking for the notes I had written about attending it in person. Those were notes about an event, not a book, but they led me straight back to two book reviews I had not touched in a long time, The Metamorphosis and Herland.
A Brief History of Losing Interest in Canada Reads
Canada Reads launched in 2002 with a simple goal, get Canadians reading the same book. I rushed out to buy that year's winner, In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, and struggled through every page. The following year I bought Next Episode by Hubert Aquin, read one page, and lost interest in the entire event.
Canada Reads stayed off my radar for over a decade after that. I remember standing in a bookstore in 2014, looking at a bundle of all five finalists for seventy dollars, and still not feeling tempted enough to buy it. Wab Kinew was defending The Orenda by Joseph Boyden, Samantha Bee was defending Cockroach by Rawi Hage, Sarah Gadon was defending Annabel by Kathleen Winter, Stephen Lewis was defending The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, and Donovan Bailey was defending Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan.
My friend Judy Gombita invited me to the live taping at the CBC studio, and I almost backed out on the morning of the event. I went anyway, because I had promised her I would. By that point, two of the five books had already been voted off.
Watching people defend a book they loved, in front of a room full of strangers, turned out to be a genuinely moving thing to witness. I kept asking myself if I could do the same for a book of my own. The defenders were just as quick to admit which books they disliked, and that honesty made the day feel more human than I expected.
Cockroach, Metamorphosis and a Familiar Transformation
That year's theme was the experience of being an outsider, and Samantha Bee argued Cockroach captured it through the immigrant experience. The novel follows a character who transforms into a cockroach at his lowest moments, and several people in the room found that image hard to sit with.
I did not find it strange at all. It reminded me instantly of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, where Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into an insect, and the story never explains why. Gregor's life before the change was already a kind of trap, since he was stuck working off a debt his parents owed his boss, and the chief clerk showing up at his door after fifteen years without a single absence only makes the transformation feel crueler.
One detail from my own notes on the book still bothers me every time I revisit it. Gregor's father had quietly been saving money the whole time his son exhausted himself paying off that debt. Nobody in the family sat down and talked honestly about their finances, and once Gregor could no longer help them, they treated him as an embarrassment instead of standing by him.
Annabel, a Confusing Detail, and Herland
Annabel was voted off that same day, and Sarah Gadon did not hide her disappointment. After the show ended, I asked her to explain something I had not understood, since I had read none of the five books myself.
From what I had heard while sitting in that room and listening to the debate, a character in Annabel could somehow impregnate herself, and a few of the other defenders had called it strange. Sarah explained the details to me, and it immediately reminded me of Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a book I had already reviewed on my site. Herland imagines a Utopian society where women have evolved to reproduce without any contribution from men.
There is an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Gilman's novel gives that saying a whole new shape, since her entire village has gone without a single man for two thousand years. Three explorers, Van, Jeff, and Terry, stumble onto that village and are captured almost immediately, put under anesthesia, and held in a locked room while the women study them and teach them the language.
Terry never adjusts to being confined the way the other two men do, and that same resistance follows him for the rest of the book. The three young women who greet the men first, Celis, Alima, and Ellador, later become the wives each man marries once they are given more freedom, though the marriages struggle since the women have no frame of reference for romantic love.
I told Sarah about Herland on the spot, and she seemed intrigued enough to promise she would read it. I still wonder, all these years later, if she ever did.
Why This Counts as Intersection Thinking
I did not call it intersection thinking while I sat in that CBC studio, though I would call it that now. Intersection thinking happens when two genuinely unrelated ideas collide and produce something new. Cockroach and The Metamorphosis were never meant to sit in the same room, and neither were Annabel and Herland.
Nobody planned those collisions. My mind made them anyway, because both older books were already sitting somewhere inside me, waiting for the right trigger.
Your Mental Library Matters More Than Your Bookshelf
Sarah Gadon could defend Annabel passionately without ever having read Herland. She brought her own reading history to that stage, and I brought mine. Neither of us had the correct set of references, we simply had different material available to connect.
That is one reason I keep pushing myself to read outside my usual lanes for Bookish Notes. If everything you read lives in one category, every new idea eventually gets forced into that same shape. A wider mental library gives a new idea more places to land.
The Payoff Can Show Up Years Later
I had no idea, when I first read The Metamorphosis, that I would end up in a CBC studio years later thinking of Gregor Samsa the moment Cockroach came up. I had no idea Herland would resurface in a conversation with an actress defending an entirely different novel.
Both books sat quietly in my mental library the whole time. The right moment simply called them forward. That is exactly why fiction is joining Bookish Notes now, since a book's usefulness rarely ends the day you finish reading it.
Canada Reads 2014 did not just introduce me to five new books. It proved that two books I had already read were still working on me, years after I thought I had closed them for good, and it took one stranger's line about The Metamorphosis on Medium to prove it all over again.
Next Steps
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