Text-ra-special

Looking back at an especially good year in books

Here’s a round-up of notable and favourite books, with one holiday gift idea thrown in to take advantage of an especially good year.

It was nice to see Julian Barnes return to fertile ground in The Sense of an Ending, a mix of middle-age-crisis and coming-of-age stories. It was even nicer to see him win the 2011 Man Book­er Prize. Also short-listed this year was Canadian rising star Patrick deWitt, who at least won The Governor General’s award for The Sisters Brothers, an eccentric Western that begs for a Coen Brothers adaptation.

David Foster Wallace’s posthumous epic The Pale King did not disappoint, but its relentless exploration of boredom and depression was not for the faint of heart. You could spend all of 2012 reading Haruki Murakami’s gargantuan 1Q84, and some people probably will. But there were plenty of satisfying short books to savour too.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, about a legacy alligator wrestler was delightful from beginning to end. Nicholson’s Baker’s House of Holes was weird, raunchy fun. Elissa Schappell’s Blueprints for Building Better Girls made me wish she’d quit her job as the book columnist for Vanity Fair and write more than one book of short stories a decade. Miriam Toews’ Irma Voth, drawn from her experiences acting in Carlos Reygadas’ slow masterpiece Silent Light, slipped by way too far under the radar.

I loved The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, but I’m a sucker for baseball love/sex triangles. In the end, my first pick goes to The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. This long-awaited fol­low-up to Middlesex is a powerful, sensitive, and compulsively readable portrayal of a young adulthood in the 80s, haunted by the spectre of economic hard times and manic depression.

JOYS OF E-READING

I started the year reading Daniel Askt’s enjoyable romp though the perils of modern life, We Have Met the Enemy: Self Control In The Age of Excess. I soon learned, however, how little control I had over the excess of interesting non-fiction books immediately available to me in my home via my iPhone Kindle App. Here’s a few of the titles I most enjoyed on the tiny screen: Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle, a compelling argument against non-stop virtual living. Soul Dust: The Magic of Con­sciousness, by British evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, was an elegant defence of the human drive to just be.

Ian Brown’s heartbreaking and beautiful tribute to his severely disabled son, The Boy in the Moon, was actually released in Canada in 2010. But because it was released in the U.S. in 2011 (thereby making it available on Kindle!) and made the New York Times top 10 books of 2011, I will not pass up the chance to recommend it again.

There’s still much to be said, however, for the old fashioned, hold-in-your-hand book. I turned the pages compulsively on Joel Yanofsky’s Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism. Stephen Fry cracked me up in The Fry Chronicles, his memoir of the golden years of British sketch comedy. Geoff Dyer became my new freelancing critic guru with his collected works Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

I am now an authority on the dog films of early Hollywood thanks to Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. My inner Canadian history geek thrilled to Conquered into Lib­erty by Eliot A. Cohen, a convincing argument by a senior American scholar that everything Americans have learned about war, they learned from fighting early Canadians!

Finally, in praise of the old fashioned hardcover, I can’t say enough about the recently released Malcolm Gladwell box set. This is how books are meant to look and feel. It’s a great gift for your favourite Gladwellian, or anyone who wants a long, nostalgic stroll through popular science in the decade after the decade of the brain. Also, these linen-bound, colourfully illustrated editions of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, will look great in the space that you saved over the past year with all your new Kindle purchases. ■

 

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