|
Year of reading dangerously >> Dysfunctional losers, serial killers and elephants by JULIET WATERS One big trend in literature this year was lots of public grumbling about lame choices of "best" books. Last summer Random House came out with a list of 100 best books of the century in a shameless attempt to promote their new line of literary classics. No Canadians made the list, resulting in months of columns and letters to newspapers. In November Diane Schoemperlen won the Governor General's Award for fiction amidst whispering that she was only getting it because the Canada Council didn't want to seem scooped by the Giller Prize, which went to Alice Munro. Later that month Ian McEwan won the Booker for Amsterdam, unanimously considered the lamest book he's ever written. As a result, I'm weaseling out of any Top 10 list and presenting my extremely subjective, narrow choices of favourites and least favourites of the year.
Feel-Bad Novel of the Year Dr. Kabfleish and the Chicken Restaurant. Cordelia Strube won this category in 1994 for Alex and Zee. This year she gets it again for another really depressing, really funny book about dysfunctional losers living in Toronto. Think of her as the Mike Leigh of Canadian lit. Best Short Stories About Bad Christmases Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. Actually, this may also be one of the best books of the year. Picked last week by the New York Times (along with Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman) for their Top 10 list. Best Novel Written From the Point of View of Animals The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy. In the past, Gowdy has written about "differently" functional families. This time she creates a "differently" functional species by imagining life from the point of view of elephants. More like The Killing Fields than Dumbo, the story would be too heartbreaking if it weren't for Gowdy's very dark and weird sense of humour. Best Plane, Train or Automobile Fiction Wire in the Blood by Val McDermid. Imagine O.J. Simpson as a serial killer offing Monica Lewinsky types. Gruesome, literate and impossible to put down after the first 100 pages. Best Great American Novel
Best Novel by an American About Canada The Museum Guard by Howard Norman. All of Norman's books are set in Canada and all are brilliant. Best Novel by a Non-Novelist The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson. From the director of Withnail and I, Robinson makes Roddy Doyle's novels seem like episodes of The Brady Bunch. Most Controversial Book This is a tie between Joyce Maynard's At Home in the World, about her teenage affair with J.D. Salinger, and Paul's Case by Lynne Crosbie, a book of poetry about Paul Bernardo. Both books were almost as irritating as the self-righteous reaction to them. Best Book by Someone Everyone's Sick Of Better Living by Mark Kingwell. We'd all be even more sick of him if we lived in Toronto, where he's the number one talking head on pop culture and popular philosophy. Still, Better Living was one of the better non-fiction books of the year. Quirkiest Concept Book The Book of Eleven by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Lists of 11 quirky thoughts on 23 subjects. Wants to be different, so I had to make her number ten.
|
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks. There were a few great American novels this year, inlcuding Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Don Delillo's Underworld. But of the long painful treks into the soul of America published in '98, Banks's Civil War epic was the most worth it.