And to think you almost stayed home.

You’re at a party with John Vaillant and Mary Roach. It’s a good party; the host has provided champagne in long-necked flutes, perfect for toasting real-life literary celebrities. You slip a fistful of candied almonds into your mouth and peer between the shoulders of other party guests for a glimpse of Vaillant. There he is: rugged, intense, as spiced and masculine as a bar of Pears soap. He is holding court in the host’s breakfast nook, where the party’s volume drops by several decibels to accommodate his measured tones. His tells his story patiently, and with coiled intensity; his hands, like his words, move economically through the plot points, pausing at all the right times to let his audience imagine the subject of his latest book: a man-eating tiger, flowing like liquid through the Siberian forest, seeing its prey a hundred times, as the saying goes, before the prey sees it once. The downy hairs below your shirt collar stand on end as you listen. It’s as though the tiger himself crouches behind you. “His hips rose slightly as he loaded and aimed the missile of himself,” Vaillant tells you, his eyes dropping only for a moment to acknowledge the glass trembling in your hand, “While the hawser of a tail twitched like a broken power line. There was the moment when impulse and prey aligned in the tiger’s mind, and then a roar filled the forest with the force of an angry god.”

You nearly lose the tenuous hold you’ve had on your bladder when an actual roar erupts behind you, piercing the stillness of Vaillant’s entourage and pinning you against the wall, terrified and disoriented, until you gather yourself enough to work out its origin: not an Amur tiger about to tear your limbs from their pulpy beds, but a group of fellow guests, gathered at the opposite side of the room, splitting themselves in two with laughter. At their center, standing on a coffee table with her skirt hitched up just above her knees for maximum range of movement, Mary Roach holds forth, glowing from the inside out with humour and hospitality. Her topic of choice: “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Orgasms,” sprung (so to speak) from her most recent volume.  She has arrived at Thing #7: pig farmers in Denmark (some of the more determined ones, anyway) sexually stimulate their sows before insemination. There is a word to describe this – the phenomenon that, in some cases, a woman’s orgasm might make her innards more accommodating for wimpy sperm. And that word, glory be to language, is “upsuck.” Roach’s audience is in pieces on the floor. She demonstrates the contortions one must undergo in order to imitate a boar’s no-nonsense courtship of his mate. For a moment, serious-minded John Vaillant is forgotten, and you want more than anything to live in Mary Roach’s crackling, rollicking world.

At least, that’s how I imagine such a party. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, but I’ve lived under the spell of these two for quite a while, hoovering up every book they publish as though starving for them. And yet they are so different; one earnest and poetic, the other exuberant and prolifically hilarious. It was the earnestness, I suppose, that attracted the CBC to John Vaillant for this year’s Canada Reads debate. Not that he was ever in competition with Mary Roach; she is not Canadian, and is therefore not eligible. To be sure, this is not a reason to feel badly for her. As many have observed, Canada Reads has far less prestige or respectability about it than it once did, which is a little sad.  Maybe John feels privately relieved to have been so efficiently eliminated, on day two, from a “debate” that was more shallow and exasperatingly repetitive than anything else on CBC that week.

But all of this ridiculous controversy did not prevent me from going to the CBC’s Toronto headquarters at 7 a.m. on February 9th in order to claim my seat in the Canada Reads recording studio.  Part of this was a stalwart devotion to John Vaillant, who, though no longer in competition, gave me reason enough to follow the debates from their first day on air.  I was also there because, while an undergrad at the University of Western Ontario (which no longer exists, incidentally), I was a panelist on UWO’s inaugural adaptation of Canada Reads.  I defended John Bemrose’s “The Island Walkers” with my debate partner, London writer and journalist James Reaney.  We lost, but I was certain that the experience alone would qualify me for all kinds of career prestige later in life (I’m still waiting for the payoff).

My alma mater’s bastard version of the national debate gave me a rugged fondness for Canada Reads, despite its many flaws.  And it meant that my sappy heart began the quiver the moment Jian Ghomeshi came bounding into the studio, wearing a tailored suit and bright red socks, tweeting on his BlackBerry with one hand while giving the shotgun to members of the audience with the other.  The experience was a true updraft in a week that nearly slayed me with relentless deadlines.  I chose a seat in the studio directly behind Shad, the ultimate victor in the debate, and right in Jian’s line of sight.  I was there on day four, which meant there were only two books left: Ken Dryden’s The Game, defended by Alan Thicke, and Shad’s selection, Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre.  I felt prickly and close to tears when the whole thing reached its denouement, wishing I had a friend with me whose hand I could grip.

Still, there was much to bemoan about the experience.  On the radio, the moment when panelists cast their secret ballots sounds like a dignified and appropriately suspenseful process; in reality, it is a bit of a gong show.  The panelists fill out secret ballots all right, but then a producer circles the table, ducking half-heartedly under the video cameras like a very bad spy on a very public mission.  Panelists who take too long to consider their choice become the target of hovering impatience.  After collecting the ballots, the producer squats on the floor (the floor!) and shuffles them into some kind of order while Jian makes awkward small talk that the radio audience will never hear.  It is all so disappointingly homemade and low-fi.  Also, there was something about Anne-France Goldwater that reminded me so viscerally of a horrible time in my life, in which I fell under the over-sized feet of a jealous and tyrannical boss for six grueling months, that I broke into a sweat each time she spoke.  It was a relief, after all of that, to leave the studio, more certain than ever that I have been right all along in seeking my literary IV drip from other sources.

In conclusion: if you’re fed up with Canada Reads and, by association, with Canadian non-fiction, take the antidote: read Vaillant’s The Tiger.  Read it now, where there is still some winter outside.

It will forever change your view of orange cats.