Hannah Sung, host of CBC’s Book Club, graciously submitted this recording from Canada Reads winner The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. (HarperCollins)

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I’m running a CONTEST at Twitter in partnership with Chapters-Indigo. They’ve offered up a generous gift card so I can go shopping! For you!

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to Twitter and follow @seenreading.
2. @reply me 10 words that describe you best.
3. Use the hashtag #srcontest
4. Next week, I’ll choose 5-10 winners at random.

But this is where the real fun begins! Using your 10 words, I’ll be your personal shopper, hand picking a book I think you might get a kick out of!

So git on over to @seenreading, and show me what you’re made of!

Across the nation, on your favourite station, Canada Reads 2009 runs March 2-6 on CBC Radio. For pics, vids, and audio from all the contenders, and to have your say about which book should win, visit www.cbc.ca/canadareads.

The kind folk at CBC have invited me back for a second year of entries. Here we go!

Southbound, Spadina and College

Asian woman, 30s, with long brown hair under white knit cap, wearing blue pea coat, and jeans tucked into white leather boots.

The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins)

Page 87:

I turned my back and squatted over the waste bucket. The baby started to scream again and I whirled around to see Fanta unsteady on her feet, standing across the room. She flipped the hood off the birdcage, opened up the wide door and grabbed the bird by the beak. Its claws flew up and raked her, and she cursed, but she kept on.

“Stop,” I called out.

Fanta ignored me. She had the medicine man’s knife in her hand. She stabbed and stabbed until the claws stopped scraping at her and the body stopped quivering. She threw the mess back in the cage, closed the door, and covered it with the hood. After wiping the knife clean, she wrapped herself, and slipped the knife inside the cloth. Then she picked up her bawling baby and shoved its face against her nipple.

Her grandmother’s Chrysler Imperial rumbled down the road away from the farm and into the city for supplies, leaving her, 12 years old, with a squawking parrot and a nearly blind woman propped before a monitor scanning the excessively large print of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. No pages to turn, she curled her shoulders forward, biting her nails, and clearing her throat to punctuate the silence, reminding the woman she had yet to leave the room. She focused on the woman’s fingernails, soft pink and peeling like discarded clam shells. The parrot called for dinner. “Oh, balls,” the woman proclaimed, pushing herself back from the table, caught by the sudden surprise of a stranger beside her.