The junior Cliff Clavins of the country will be delighted by the Scholastic Canada Book of Lists, a behemoth collection of gross, interesting, and/or useless facts. Weighing in at 320 pages, with over 250 lists, this book covers a wide range of topics, aimed at readers aged 8 to 12.

Originally compiled for a U.S. market, this version is a Canadianization by Pat Hancock (Haunted Canada), with uneven results. While Canadian content is fairly well represented, including lists of national Victoria Cross winners and prime ministers, the text remains heavily U.S.-based in content and sources. Canadian kids can learn the licence plate slogans from the 50 states, and read how Washington, D.C., is “our” nation’s capital, but a list of Nobel Peace Prize winners makes no mention of Lester B. Pearson, the only Canadian recipient.

Young readers may not notice such national biases, but they will notice mistakes, and there are several. In one of the more egregious examples, we learn that Ogopogo (the famed sea monster in Lake Okanagan) lives in Lake Ogopogo. Hopefully some of the errors will be corrected before publication.

But even if they are, the book’s organizing principles are unclear, so that many lists seem rather arbitrary, like the one about the first and last five place names on the Canadian Geographical Names register – information even Cliff Clavin might find too trivial.