Bookends

10 memorable reads
from the year behind

by JULIET WATERS

1. Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. When I first reviewed this book last January, Shubin didn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. Since then, the book has become Amazon’s number one title on evolution. Shubin, who discovered a bone that convincingly links humans to fish, has been on The Colbert Report, but he hasn’t exactly been embraced as the next Charles Darwin. Too bad. His book is not only convincing proof, it’s an entertaining, elegant travelogue through the Arctic, and a great introduction to the mysteries of the human skeleton.

2. The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, A d v e n t u r e , Commerce and Obsession by Adam Leith Gollner. Primitive genetic memory is the only reason I can come up with for why this fascinating voyage into the joys and evils of the fruit business lost the Quebec Writer’s Federation award to Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe. Bottomfeeder was an interesting primer on the politics of seafood, but it leapt to too many debatable conclusions and recommendations. Gollner doesn’t have the easy answers to food politics because, frankly, there are no easy answers. Instead, he wrote a beautiful book, rich with the contradictions that have always existed about food and always will.

3. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. This doesn’t seem to have made as many year-end lists as Blink and The Tipping Point. So What. It’s Gladwell’s best book to date. Even those not entirely on board for his project of turning the world into a better meritocracy will be impressed by his arguments against the idea that success can ever be an individual accomplishment.

4. A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours and Mine by Patricia Pearson. It should be no surprise if the title sounds like a subtle shout-out to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Pearson shares Bryson’s intelligence, dry sense of humour and ability to condense complicated ideas into engaging stories. Despite her impressive Canadian pedigree (you may know her family from the airport), this book comes out solidly against our cultural desperation for success. Depending on your taste, this is a good companion read for Outliers, or Bryson’s latest, Shakespeare: The World as Stage.

5. My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories From Chekov to Munro, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides. A failsafe Christmas present, even for people with whom you have no romantic attachment. As Eugenides wryly points out “Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.” Good to have on hand if your current relationship doesn’t survive the January break-up odds.

6. What It Is by Lynda Barry. Buy this and you many never watch television again. Barry’s creative process is a bit like doodling on the phone with your muse. A gorgeous book. What we might expect from William Blake if he had a comix strip. Great for writers and artists, but especially writers.

7. The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames, illustrated by Dean Haspiel. Anyone raised on Marvel comics will find this graphic memoir addictively nostalgic. Ames recalls, and Haspiel illustrates a hilarious but painful young adulthood as a talented writer and drunk. When you’re finished, check out Ames’s blog on Slate.com about his brief stay in Montreal.

8. The Joy of Spooking by P.J. Bracegirdle. Young, smart girls and all Montrealers will appreciate this witty horror story about a “terrible town on a hideous hill” by a local writer with a fiendishly bright future.

9. Bigfoot, I Not Dead by G r a h a m Roumieu. If I have one guilty pleasure, it’s B-list autobiographies. I don’t understand the sick thrill I get from reading about the inevitable demise of that special nobody. And, frankly, I don’t want to. I could just keep reading Roumieu’s brilliantly illustrated satire of Bigfoot’s struggle with obscurity, like, forever. Why can’t they make this a reality show?

10. Inside Outside Overlap by Billy Mavreas. Finally! And well worth the wait. This wordless graphic novel has been many years in the making and it shows. Mavreas’s sublime pencil sketching is a huge departure from the high contrast head shop bunnies of yesteryear. Every time I re-read this adventure of Boy Priest and his faithful furry sidekick, Life Form, I find a new delight lurking beneath the layers of shading. Reads like a recurring dream.