annual navel gaze

My favourite books of 2007:




Looks like a short pile, you're thinking. And yes, there are a few missing. Most notably Black Bird, by Michel Basilieres. This is because I send almost all book club books (um, not the one by Judy Blume) to my friend who moves to non-English countries where Canadian literature, in particular, is difficult to find. (Except Atwood, I guess. But I wonder how Atwood translates to Eastern European sensibilities? Or South Korean ones?)

(Um, another interruption. CBC is playing Bridget Jones's Diary again, and they actually SKIP the part at the end when Bridget says, "Nice boys don't kiss like that," and Mark says, "Oh yes they fucking do." Or something like that. My defense on this one is I've not necessarily memorized all the lines so much as the Van Morrison song at the end just skipped rather noticeably.)

Back to my points....

Big surprise of the year? I liked Nick Hornby. Not enough to ever try Fever Pitch again, but certainly enough to try About A Boy, for example.

Other discoveries.... Short stories can be inspiring, rather than boring. (I maintain the problem with Charlotte Gill's book was it felt like a paint-by-numbers, this-is-how-you-win-an-award collection of stories. I'm sure I'm wrong. And I'm probably just jealous.)

.... I can get through a year without reading a single Atwood novel. I feel kind of sad, though.

.... I didn't actually include Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate in my eye-pleasing pile here, but I loved that book. And a year without chocolate wasn't bad at all. Which is good, because I'm now entering Year 2.

No surprises: A soppy romance by an Irish writer was fun to read in about 24 hours. Still looking forward to the movie, even though the Americans will probably ruin it. And, a second soppy romance written by the same writer was even more fun to read in even less than 24 hours.

The author whose next work I'm most looking forward to? Alison Pick's. Read The Sweet Edge, people.

the bad canuck

I am trying to read one of those books you're supposed to read.

You know, the kind of book that makes the Globe and Mail's weekly lists, the kind of book that cracks the Gillers....

The kind of book you just keep wanting to put down?

I feel like if Charlotte Gill's Ladykiller and I were dating, then we would need a break. Which is silly, because our dates have been so short. It's almost as if we weren't really dating at all.

But it's not the book, really. It's me.

The thing is, I joke about my short attention span (bunny!), but really, I'm a little too OCD for short stories. I want to be drawn in by characters. I want to know everything about their hopes, their mistakes, their demise or their happy endings.

I can't deal with lonely snapshots of unhappiness.

(Example: She can't see the light in anything. She finds nothing funny. She never did. He wants to feed her a bloody steak in small bites. He wants to lay her out under a tropical sun. He wants to carry her into the bedroom and peel the clothes away. He feels like covering his wife and injecting her with happiness. If only it were transferable, like cash or body heat, this thing that he has that she doesn't. The average contentment she jealously despises, that makes her hate him along with the rest of the world. -- p. 42, from the short story Hush)

Sure, I recognize the innate poetry.

And I can always appreciate the poetry of melancholy.

But I need the depth of a novel. I like to think I need it in my own writing, and I'm coming round to the realization I need it in what I'm reading.

In Hush, I want to know what made Patty start to hate Brian. I want to know if Brian hates Patty or if he's just mirroring her emotions. I want to know more, more, more.

Even if I love this line, from the first story, You Drive: He said sexy things and hurtful things, and the trouble was that she lived and died by what fell out of his mouth. (p. 11)

Sing it, sister.

Just, you know, for longer than fifty pages.