Topic 5: Books of the Year

Robert: I am not sure what it means that I began more books this year that I didn’t read completely - my changing tastes? Impatience? A large to-be-read pile? In any case, in the past, by year’s end, I normally would have had 30-40 books on my recommended list. So, here are the books - a few non fiction, a short story collection, a trio of novellas, a number of so-called genre works and Garcia Marquez’s whatchamacallit, that I have no hesitation in offering to any reader looking for a (readerly) good time:

North - Fredrick Busch
The Bright Forever - Lee Martin
Dancing With Cuba - Alma Guillermoprieto
The Hot Kid - Elmore Leonard
Valley Of Bones - Michael Gruber
No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
The Power of the Dog - Don Winslow
The Summer He Didn't Die - Jim Harrison
My Cold War - Tom Piazza
The Long Emergency - James Howard Kunstler
The King of Kings County -Whitney Terrell
The March - E.L. Doctorow
Trance - Christopher Sorrentino
The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure - Jack  Pendarvis   
Articles of War - Nick Arvin
With - Donald Harington
The Wild Girl - Jim Fergus
Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Jessa: Once again, I did not get around to reading all that much of this year's nonfiction. So that list is going to be short. However, I did a surprising job keeping up with fiction. This list is in no particular order.

Fiction

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes
God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell
Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson
Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Paradise by A.L. Kennedy
Beware of God by Shalom Auslander

Nonfiction

Epileptic by David B.
War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres
Lessons in Taxidermy by Bee Lavender
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son by Peter Manseau
War's End by Joe Sacco

Reprints of the Year

Diary of Andres Fava by Julio Cortazar (Archipelago)
The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (Dalkey)
The Contract with God Trilogy by Will Eisner (W.W. Norton)
Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay (Sunday Press Books)

Alex: On the one hand I want to say "What a disappointing year." When I think of all the big-name authors who either fell on their faces or just muddled along with really substandard or mediocre books, it's enough to make you question your will to go on cracking the covers. But of course that was only the big names. The really good stuff was just a little harder to find.

If ever there was a time to turn away from the current literary establishment and look elsewhere, this is it! And though I don't usually wave the flag, I think you have to be pretty excited about some of the stuff coming out of the Canadian small press scene. They should be getting way more coverage. I know it's an old story, but you have to wonder why more of an effort isn't being made to recognize quality work that doesn't have a huge promotional budget behind it. Couldn't some national book critics at least have a "hidden treasures" column every now and then? Especially after a year like this. Anyway . . .

Fiction: The Dodecahedron by Paul Glennon and The Grammar Architect by Chris Eaton. Great stuff! I also enjoyed David Marusek's debut SF novel Counting Heads. Poetry: The Burning Alphabet by Barry Dempster and From Sarajevo, With Sorrow by Goran Simic. Non-fiction: The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant.

Only one non-Canadian book! We rocked this year.

Michael:

Case Histories, Kate Atkinson
The Sea, John Banville
Slow Man, J.M.Coetzee
The Good Stalin, Victor Erofeyev (not yet available in English)
Ghosting, Jennie Erdal
99 Ways to Tell a Story, Matt Madden
Centuria, Giorgio Manganelli
Saturday, Ian McEwan
The Plot against America, Philip Roth
In the Flesh, Christa Wolf

Honorable mentions:

- The Aesthetics of Resistance, Peter Weiss - one of the most important German novels of the post-WWII era, finally available (well, the first third) in English
- The Clay Sanskrit Library - one of the publishing events of the year

Maud: My favorite novel of the year is the University of Chicago Press' reprint of Peter DeVries' The Blood of the Lamb, a tirade against faith inspired by the death of the author's daughter. Not since Graham Greene's The End of the Affair has a book rendered man's rage against a hostile God so visceral. The Blood of the Lamb has its defects; it lacks the structural perfection of the Greene book, for one thing. But, unlike Greene's unremittingly bitter and wistful Bendrix, DeVries' Don Wanderhope moves deftly from manic hilarity to manic fury, and back again, as he tells his story. At the end, all humor drains away in a strange, explosive and utterly hopeless confrontation with the divine.

It was a great year for fiction. I'm including more favorites below, some of which I'm writing about in a piece for Newsday.  In place of the usual caveats about all the books I've missed this year, and the older books I've read and loved, I've also tacked some classics onto the end of the list.

Fiction
Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel
Divided Kingdom, Rupert Thomson,
Slow Man, JM Coetzee
Paradise, AL Kennedy
The Untelling, Tayari Jones
The Task of This Translator (for "Will Power, Inc.," and a couple other brilliant stories, unevenness of the collection as a whole notwithstanding), Todd Hasak-Lowy
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (for the alarming distopian vision, despite some implausibilities and weak characterization)

Memoirs
Zioncheck for President, Phil Campbell (a friend of mine)
Husband of a Fanatic, Amitava Kumar

Nonfiction
Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776, Ian Williams
Mark Twain: A Life, Ron Powers

Translation
The Old Child and Other Stories, Jenny Erpenbeck

Classics I First Read This Year
Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford