Canada Reads down to four titles

The first round of votes is in on the Canada Reads series to determine a single book to be read by all Canadians.

The all-star panel of champions from past Canada Reads have eliminated Gabrielle Roy's Children of My Heart, the only book among those in contention that was written in the last century.

Author Donna Morrissey and Weakerthans musician John Samson voted against the book, which was being championed by broadcaster Denise Bombardier.

"Out of the five books and I loved them all this was the one that caused me the most problems with voice," Morrissey said after revealing her vote Wednesday.

Bombardiersaid she hadtrouble with the voice of Lullabies for Little Criminals, Heather O'Neill's book about a young girl moving through a Montreal underworld of drugs and prostitution.

"It didn't convince me," she said. "All the characters are so stereotyped. It's a brutal, depressing coming-of-age story and it didn't touch me."

Later in the show,Bombardier also spoke against Anosh Irani's The Song of Kahunsha, another story about a child trying to survive in the world without adult protection, this novel set in Bombay.

"The use of present tense makes the whole book read as if it is in a monotone," she said,adding it doesn't compare well with literature by better-known Indian writers.

"I knew from the beginning what was going to happening at the end," she said.

Both Samson and Morrissey came to the defence of The Song of Kahunsha.

"It gave me such a poignant view of what it is to be an orphan on the street," said Morrissey,who chose the book.

"We have a sense of [the main character's] newness to the street and that fit with my newness to this environment."

There was also a timeliness to the book, she said, because it deals with themes of terrorism.

Padded prose

Samson also put in a good word for Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor, saying it was the most ambitious book on the list, treating so many themes at once.

The book is about a chef who is trying to launch his own restaurant and his relationship with his father, who is living among the homeless in Stanley Park in Vancouver.

But Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies said the large amount of research in Stanley Park seemed like padding, as if the writer was trying to show off how much he knew.

Bombardier agreed, saying much of the writing about what happens inrestaurant kitchens was dull.

"I love cuisine, but it's boring," she said. "The real thing is the bad relationship between father and son, but it's lost amid the cuisine."

The other book in contention, Natasha and Other Stories, had a single vote against it by panellist Jim Cuddy.

The Canada Reads panelcontinues eliminating books onThursday with a plan to choose a single book by Friday. The Canada Reads series isairing daily this week on CBC Radio One at 11:30 a.m. (12 noon NT) and 7:30 p.m. (8 p.m. NT).