THE YEAR IN REVIEW - 2006
By Alex Good
January 1, 2007
"Behold I see the haven night
at hand,
To which I meane my wearie course to bend;
Vere the maine shete, and beare up with the land,
The which afore is fairely to be kend,
And seemeth safe from stormes, that may offend;
There this faire virgin wearie of her way
Must landed be, now at her journeyes end:
There eke my feeble barke a while may stay,
Till merry wind and weather call her thence away."
- Spenser
Sing it, Edmund! Time to stick a fork in another year. 2006 is
done.
With such weary cynicism do I turn the page. But I come by it
honestly. This year was (another) tough slog. Only this time not so much
because of external factors - the demands of that old busybody "real
life" - but rather due to the kinds of difficulties inherent in running
such a site. Difficulties that are metastasizing. Specifically, I am being
overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to read. This is a problem because goodreports.net
is, first and foremost, a review site. Which means I have to do a lot
of reading to keep it going. I took a break from the News page for six months to
try and catch up. That plan didn't work.
The numbers tell the story. In any given year I can read about
100 books. And I insist, for the purposes of retaining what I have left of my
sanity, that not all of these be new books. In the summer of 2006 I figured I
had 125 books, and these are books that I really wanted to get to, piling up around the house.
Over a year's worth of reading. I wanted to try to whittle this down. I failed. At
year's end the pile had grown to over 200 books. Two year's worth of reading.
And it's still growing, with more and more publishers sending me stuff directly.
When am I ever going to get a chance to read Against the Day, or that new
history of the Crusades (both clocking in at over 1,000 pages)? You can see the
logistical logjam.
Compared to this, the technical difficulties seem minor. But
they continue to grow as well. The fact is, I am not a computer-savvy person. I
don't even like the things that much. No
aspect of running this site gives me less pleasure. And yet as the Internet
continues to evolve this side of things only becomes more complicated, and
unfortunately more essential. "Shutting down" at the end of the day,
or even just being offline, is a relief.
My own feelings toward the Internet are now pretty deeply
ambivalent. It is, maybe just still, a medium offering opportunities for the expression
of opinions unavailable elsewhere. But it has been a disappointment too. Advertising is
becoming more ubiquitous, sophisticated, and aggressive all the time. And did
anyone ever really believe that content would be "king" on
the Internet? Content is crap. Traffic is king. This is because traffic is what can be measured
and monetized. Furthermore, all traffic (beyond a certain, limited reader base)
is search engine traffic. And, as of the time of this writing (though I see no
reason why their hegemony should long survive) all search engine traffic is
Google traffic. These are the current rules of the game. And, as
explained in a recent Los Angeles Times article, "Today, the name of
the game is gaming the system," the murky world of search engine
optimization and basically cluttering the
Internet with junk in order to boost one's rankings. It is a situation that I'm
afraid is only
going to get worse.
Rant over. Now, on to the year in books.
By which I mean, what I read this year. I'll spare going over
the various scandals that transpired in BookWorld. Suffice it to say that
"scandal" was the operative word in 2006, from Frey and Viswanathan at
the beginning of the year to Judith Regan at the end. Is it just me, or was this
past year one of the seediest yet for the publishing biz? I shudder at the
thought of what they might do for an encore.
But putting all that aside, there was still a lot to enjoy
between the covers. Without a doubt my "Best Book of the Year" award would go to Robert Fisk's The
Great War for Civilisation. Over 1,300 pages and I couldn't put it down.
Sticking with
politics, there
were a bunch of timely books on different aspects of the American (mis)adventure in Iraq. I thought Isikoff and Corn's Hubris was the
best. And as an attempt to make sense of the American political scene I found
Michael Adams's American
Backlash to be invaluable.
In
poetry I was pleasantly surprised to read a strong short list for this year's Runaway Jury,
including
Airstream Land Yacht by Ken Babstock, Home of Sudden Service by
Elizabeth Bachinsky, and Inventory by Dionne Brand. David Hickey's In
the Lights of a Midnight Plow could have been on that list too. And I'd
also like to make special mention of the Kids Can Press "Visions in Poetry" series. What
a great idea! I wish they'd had such wonderful little volumes when I was a kid.
I
also read a lot of good Canadian fiction. The following stood out. Short
Stories: Hitting the Charts by Leon Rooke, Home Schooling by Carol
Windley, and Zero Gravity by Sharon English. Novels:
Inside by Kenneth Harvey,
The Mole Chronicles by Andy Brown, and De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage.
I'm surprised, looking back, that there were so few works of non-Canadian
fiction I really enjoyed this year. Perhaps I was focusing more on domestic
production. I guess I should mention McCarthy's The
Road, but it's a book that left me with some mixed feelings. Does being
"great shit" count?
What's
to come? Well, I'm going to work hard to try and wrap up my series on "The
Classics and the Pops." I also want to try and launch the photography page,
Visions, in the summer. Aside from
that, I'd just like to keep
my head above water with the reviews. Fingers crossed!
Best wishes for a safe and happy New Year,
Alex Good
alex@goodreports.net
