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.

yet another book club

http://www.cjob.com/station/blog_adler_bookclub.aspx

Thanks to a friend for pointing out this link.... Now we can all take a moment to wonder at the effects of celebrity on private radio broadcasters listened to mostly by people who drive trucks. (At least it's not Rutherford? Whose first book, I assume, would be The Prince, and whose follow-ups might include the latest Harper biography?)

"Adler nation." ".... truly privileged in being part of something new and very special." (Because no one has ever come up with this broadcast-book concept before. Not some lady in Chicago and certainly not a national public broadcaster.) ".... one of the planet's top publishers."

Sigh. Okay, I'll stop picking now. Turns out yesterday was Grouch Day. But today I have no excuse.

(Top 5 books I would list should I ever become a radio personality/minor celebrity in charge of a book club and somehow bettering the nation's literacy:

1. Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood -- hah, you thought I'd pick Handmaid's Tale, eh? Too obvious. This tome is a better think piece on femininity.
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen -- super obvious. After asking people to read Persuasion last autumn, I'm afraid of further ruining Austen for anyone who's never read her.
3. The Stone Carvers, Jane Urquhart -- a romantic, startling reflection of First World War-era Canada.
4. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle -- an excellent children's novel, possibly my all-time favourite. Publishers turned down the novel several times, making L'Engle re-write it and re-write it, honing it to perfection.
5. A new entry, and, I think, a starting- or end-point for a paper on the Jewish-American woman's experience in literature. I'm not sure if it's the start or end because, frankly, I'm not overwhelmingly familiar with how much Jewish-American women's literature there is out there. The Guy Not Taken, Jennifer Weiner.

Okay, that's enough for today. Surely all my choices will change tomorrow, or within the hour. Like, immediately I want to switch Urquhart for David Bergen's The Time in Between. Or Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan. And maybe L'Engle should be replaced by The Time Traveller's Wife? And do I really want to end the list off with a group of short stories by Weiner? Even if I did think "Swim" was absolutely gorgeous, does Weiner belong on the same bookshelf as Austen? Even if I was impressed by her notes at the end of the book, which explained how she came to write each piece, and in what year?)