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Quick, how many Canadian authors can you name? If you can think of just one, then you named more than 47% of 1,502 Canadians surveyed, according to this article that recently appeared in the daily Canadian newspaper The National Post. It says that only 53% of Canadians can name a single Canadian author. Pardon me while I channel Hermione Granger in class: “Oh, oh, I know I know, pick me!”

Over 1,500 Canadians were surveyed and nearly half failed to remember Alice Munro, Farley Mowat, or Michael Ondaatje. Well, I admit, I didn't know those three were Canadian, either. But what about Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell? I'm not too surprised that most Americans don't know they're Canadian, but I assumed Canadians would know.

22% of those who could name at least one Canadian author named Margaret Atwood. That's only a little over 10% of everyone surveyed. Marshall McLuhan, anyone?

I've been lucky enough to have come across several good and not very well-known Canadian writers over the past few years.

Dave Bidini wrote a fun book called Baseballissimo , in which he took his young family to Italy for six months to observe a season in the life of an Italian baseball team. Although the rules of the game were familiar, everything else about baseball in Italy had an exotic flavor. Players cared about how they looked (la bella figura) and didn't chew on sunflower seeds or tobacco during the game. Post-game meals featured homemade pizza and pasta with wine rather than ribs and beer.

Chris Gudgeon's book about sex in Canada, The Naked Truth , is more of a self-mocking look at Canadian society in general, rather than a Kinsey-like examination of sex habits.

Laura Byrne Paquet's book The Urge to Splurge is an entertaining social history of shopping. This one is more for fun than for serious research. The same goes for her book on the social history of travel, Wanderlust. Fellow Canadian Pamela Kaffke wrote a similar book on the cultural history of shopping called Spree. Also recommended.

I came across something on the internet a few years ago about Americans mistreating, even torturing, German prisoners of war during and after World War II. This was during the Abu Ghraib revelations, and although it seemed possible, I wanted to see if there were any corroborations. That led me to a book by Canadian journalist James Bacque. Other Losses is a controversial book about widespread neglect and other mistreatment of German military and civilian prisoners of the U.S. Army. My own conclusion about the book is that it overstates the extent and the nature of the mistreatment. That doesn't excuse the mistreatment that occurred, but it didn't reach Abu Ghraib levels, for what that's worth.

Some good books on language by Canadian writers are two by Mark Abley (The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English and Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages ) and Michael Wex (Just Say Nu and Born to Kvetch ). Abley's books are about what is happening to language, how some languages are dying, others are springing up (cybertalk and Global English), and all languages are in a constant state of upheaval. Wex's books are about Yiddish and its influence on English. We enthusiastically recommend all four books.

As usual, I'm a bit weak on the fiction side, but here is a series of political murder mysteries by a Canadian author. The Joanne Kilbourn Mysteries by Gail Bowen take place in Saskatchewan and are so Canadian that they assume the reader is familiar with Canadian national and provincial politics, as well as everyday things like Timbits, Nanaimo bars, and toques (donut holes, a homemade dessert, and wool caps). I keep a list of things to look up on Wikipedia as I read these.

                  photo courtesy filo1000 on flikr

I keep meaning to read a novel by Margaret Atwood, and even bought a couple of her paperbacks, but can't seem to warm up to them. She met me more than halfway though, by writing a nonfiction book called Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth . It's a series of radio lectures she delivered on CBC radio. I quite enjoyed her discussions of debt, financial and ethical, as she blended her personal memories with literary and historical references.

But my favorite Canadian writer just might be Lynn Johnston, whose comic strip, For Better or For Worse, has been running for twenty-nine years. Who are your favorites?

copyright Lynn Johnston Productions