As a fan of The Debaters I started out quite enjoying Steve Patterson's collection of comedic letters to recipients from "Jesus" to "lawyers" to "the letter X." Like the radio show, the book's humour includes quite a bit of wordplay, is slightly to the left of centre, and is relatable to the type of Canadian who falls into the CBC's core audience. I had two issues though. First is that it felt really long, with over 90 letters and only a few of them really hilarious. I would've preferred he write more where a theme was really working and edited himself more where the jokes were just so-so (e.g. the poorly-researched letter to Sir John A. Macdonald, which actually gives him a shout-out for naming Canada after an Indigenous word, when he was a pretty instrumental figure in our genocidal policies towards Indigenous people).

Second, there were more cringeworthy moments in the book, which became hard to laugh off, including fat jokes, cliché gender stereotypes, and a particularly essentialist/trans-exclusionary letter about X and Y chromosomes. I don't think any of this was intentional but on the gender stereotypes Patterson definitely knows better. In such a long collection, those letters could've easily been missed to the benefit of the whole.