Souvenir Of Canada 2

From Canadian Sayings to How to Be a Canadian, bookstore shelves are filling up with tomes purporting to tell us what it means to be a citizen of the Great White North. In an age of irony, this means appreciating the little, sometimes kitschy, things we have taken for granted. And who better to shed new light on the Reach for the Top game show, the Robertson screwdriver, and Toronto's domination of the country than that master of irony, Douglas Coupland?

The Vancouver novelist (Generation X, Hey Nostradamus!) and visual artist has curated a second immensely readable, highly entertaining, and even fun-for-the-whole-family follow-up to his first Souvenir of Canada. The mini-essays include Coupland's thoughts on the now sadly defunct Eaton's catalogue (all the models, he writes, look as though they have been "seemingly selected at random from the White Pages") as well as such uniquely Canadian identifiers as treeplanters, the Royal Bank's "scary bank calendar," treeplanters, and what he calls "Canada's one true national art form," indignant letters to the editor. Souvenir 2 also benefits from Coupland's unique visual perspective. The longest essay in the book illustrates numerous interior photos of a house he was commissioned to remodel to reflect Canadian identity.

But turns disturbing, enlightening, and humourous, Souvenir of Canada 2 accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do--it makes the reader look at "Canadianness" with new eyes--and with a bonus. Two essays, one on Terry Fox and another an anecdote drawn from Coupland's youth, add an emotional underpinning to the book that, as corny as it may sound, might actually cause the Canadian reader's breast to swell with pride. And that's no joke. --Shawn Conner