The CBC's Idea of "Fun" Is a Joyless, Overwrought Book Competition

I've been home sick all week with the mother-of-all-colds and have been listening off and on to Canada Reads. It's an annual event that aims to identify the one book that every Canadian should read because it will change your life and/or the planet in a positive and progressive way.

Here, for instance, is a description of one of the books in the running this year, The Marrow Thieves:

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream.

In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden. But what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.

Climate change; natives being victimized by eee-ville non-indigenes; suffering; death: I can't think of another novel that is more up the Ceeb's sanctimonious alley.

Except, perhaps, for this one:

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky.

And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war.

Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war as one of the Miraculous Generation and now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past — his family's role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.

Nope. Not going to read that one, either, even if it "wins."