Favourite adult books of 2013

Ah, the tradition continues. This year, I read 64 adult books, 23 children's books (all the dregs from my last year of judging) and three teen books. Alas, only three were nonfiction, and only three were graphica... Am I getting set in my ways? Wait, don't answer that. Picking up on Pasha Malla's recent article, 40 of my 64 were female authors, while 23 were male, and 26 were Canadian. As he says, to a certain extent these distinctions are meaningless, but I do like to see how balanced, or unbalanced I am (don't comment on that, either!)... and I like to see how much I "stretch."

Here's the best of the best, in sound bites (more complete reviews of many of these have appeared on this blog throughout the year):

1. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth E. Wein: A teenage British spy captured by the Gestapo tells her story as she writes her confession; a tale of unshakable spirits and amazing female friendship that will break your heart.
2. The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin: the mother of Jesus reflects back on her life in her twilight years in semi-captivity. A troubled, nuanced portrait with surprising revelations about charisma, misogyny and "spin."
3. Above All Things by Tanis Rideout: OK, this one may not be a book for the ages as are some others on this list. It is a solid read, however, and I read it at just the right time for the story to truly move me. Read this even if you care nothing for sports (like me).
4. A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee: Speaking of spin, I have found myself quoting from this book quite a few times recently during the age of Ford. This is a book that excels at making the universal personal: a public figure who slips, and his wife, who in the wake of her husband's scandal becomes a crisis management expert herself, are ultimately redeemed, in the imperfect manner of the modern world.
5. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer: These friends, with their faults and their loves and their passionate re-inventions, made me feel good about the world, and the people I share it with.
6. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson: Ursula and her lives are infinitely fascinating, in a kind of literary "Choose your own adventure" way. A novel about choices, opportunities, and fate.
7. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: A strange little novel about the lengths you might go for the ones you love.
8.  Night Film by Marisha Pessl: Speaking of strange, this is quite the departure in some ways from (and in others, quite similar to) Special Topics in Calamity Physics. A brick of a book about mystery, superstition, celebrity, and, ultimately, the lengths we go to protect the ones we love.
9. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: No small praise here: this is the best book I have read since White Teeth about race in the modern Western world.
10. The Orenda by Joseph Boyden: a detailed, heartbreaking and dazzlingly human portrait of a pivotal moment in our young country's history.

Favourite adult books of 2012

Happy New Year!

I read 93 adult books in 2012, up from 52 in 2011. My changing professional role was reflected in the fact that I only read 28 children's and teens books (compared to 77 in 2011).

In 2013, I hope to keep increasing those adult numbers, and since this is my last year as a judge for the CLA Book of the Year for Children, make the children's books I read great ones that I choose myself for a change! It has been a great joy to be on the BOYCA committee, but I will not miss the speed-reading of 60-odd children's novels by Canadian authors with varying degrees of talent.

Without further ado, here it is, my pretties: the top 10 of 2012!

1. Gold by Chris Cleave: Chris’s writing has a way of grabbing you firmly by the heart and pulling, hard. The protagonists in this story are three Olympic bike racers, getting a bit long in the tooth in their early 30s and facing their last Olympics (London 2012). Despite not being at all interested in competitive sport, I could not put this down. There is much about the competitive spirit of world-class athletes in here, but there is also a love triangle, a child struggling with cancer, and a sensitive exploration of the choices we make in life, and the paths we choose and can also change. There are some absolute gems of phrasing and emotion in here. Read it. Some readers have compared the relationship in this novel between two strong women as reminiscent of Atwood’s The Robber Bride (my favourite of hers), and that is somewhat apt. For other heart-wrenching tales, however (for you masochists who like to cry while reading), I would recommend Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones or The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart.
2. Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie: You may or may not know that I heart Rushdie, but we have  a fraught relationship. On the one hand, Imaginary Homelands changed my life, Midnight's Children acted as a closing bookend of sorts to my thesis about E. M. Forster, and I will watch any interview / attend any reading Rushdie gives, because I find him a fascinating and erudite speaker whose perspective I often find completely refreshing. On the other hand, I didn't finish The Satanic Verses, and have a low threshold for some of Rushdie's bombast. So, I embarked on Joseph Anton unsure how we were going to get along. Turns out I couldn't put it down, even if sometimes it drove me crazy (which probably encapsulates how I feel about Rushdie overall, frankly). I didn't mind the 2nd person narrative, found his unravelling of the Gordian Knot of his time under the fatwa deeply moving, vehemently agreed with many of his conclusions and observations about Western society's complex relationship with Islam, and found his stories about the supportive friendships that sustained him during his time in hiding (including a lovely one about a trip to Canada, involving being hugged by Bob Rae and serenaded by Adrienne Clarkson) compelling (I kept following the Husband around saying, "Listen to this!"). As a thank you of sorts to those who stood by him, and a statement about East/West relations during a tumultuous time in modern history, this is a tremendous book. As an indictment of those who abandoned, or outright criticised him, this book is less effective: Rushdie doesn't mince words, and in many cases rightly so, but sometimes a more unflattering spite seeps out of the pages, which is a pity. This is still an absolute must-read, however. Frankly, it's hard to begrudge him a little spite sometimes.
3. 
   Astray by Emma Donoghue: These stories are all about people on the move: between identities, places, or lives. I read this on the train, which was unintentionally perfectly appropriate. All of the stories are based on real-life people, and Donoghue follows each tale with a description of the actual events, whether it be a newpaper clipping about a female con artist or a series of letters between a husband and wife separated by an ocean (that story made me cry). The Guardian used the word frustrating when talking about the brevity of these tales; that is something that often bothers me in short stories, but here I felt that each story was so perfectly crafted that I didn't mind. Plus, frankly, I am happy to see that the pre-Room Donoghue is still around.
4. South Riding by Winifred Holtby: see review here. Readers who enjoyed Emma Brown (completed from Charlotte Brontë’s draft by Clare Boylan), Muriel Spark or our own massively-underappreciated Gwethalyn Graham will enjoy this novel.
5. Shine shine shine by Lydia Netzer: see review here. 

6. Sleeping funny by Miranda Hill: Well, I already loved Miranda for Project Bookmark, and now I just love her extra. These short stories all have an element of the magical, or just plain odd, about them, from a suspicious neighbour who may just have dropped out of a fairy tale, to a group of children who are afflicted with visions of their own conception (some surprises there!). These stories made me laugh out loud, and also cry. Warning: the one that won the Journey Prize was actually my least-favourite in the collection.... 
7. This is how you lose her by Junot Diaz: no, your eyes do not deceive you. I, an avowedly lukewarm reader of short stories, have chosen three collections in my top 10 this year. In October, I admitted that I was, indeed, oddly sympathetic with the rat narrator of this collection, especially for someone who spent four years with her very own serial philanderer. These stories, about the Yunior you may be familiar with from Drown, will break your heart as they draw you into the flawed but somehow tender heart of a troubled young man.
8. The grief of others by Leah Hager Cohen: Ricky Ryrie blames her husband John for a lot, but she blames herself for more, in this story of family secrets and new beginnings. The Ryries, parents to two living children and one recently-deceased baby boy, are struggling to move forward through their grief when John’s older daughter from a previous relationship shows up on their doorstep unexpectedly. Cohen’s writing gave me goose bumps; speaking about the Ryries’ dead child, she writes, “He wore, during his short life, a white cotton shirt with a single covered side snap, a white flannel receiving blanket, and a white cotton cap. … He was given two diaper changes, the second proving unnecessary.” It’s easy to see how this gem of a book made it on the Orange Prize longlist. . It has been a long time since I have rooted so strongly for a young girl, as I did for the Elizabeth “Biscuit” Ryrie, who we first meet when she has stolen a library book about funeral rites and falls into the Hudson River after a ritual for her dead baby brother goes wrong. Everyone in this book is barely coping with their grief (over the baby but also over their own personal tragedies and changing relationships with one another), but the story is somehow still gentle, hopeful and beautiful. If the past is a foreign country, so too is the grief of others, even those closest to us. This one is for readers who enjoy Joyce Carol Oates, Julia Glass, Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter or Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.
9. Everybody has everything by Katrina Onstad: Onstad captures perfectly the human spirit that lurks below a veneer of suits, heels, polished front doors, and shiny car windows in downtown Toronto. Ana and James are one such couple: half suit, half wrinkled artsy type, muddling towards early middle age childless and drifting apart (maybe). Into this mix falls small Finn, the young child of their good friends, left in their care after a car accident that claims Finn’s father and leaves his mother in a coma. Thrust into temporary parenthood (they wonder if Robert Crumb is appropriate bedtime reading as it’s the only illustrated book they have), Ana and James re-think their roles in their marriage, and the choices they have made without always realizing something was chosen. This is a character novel, and, to be frank without giving too much away, it’s about James wanting Finn desperately and Ana discovering that she doesn’t. Sure to divide readers, Ana’s struggles will hopefully spark meaningful book club discussions about what modern women can, or should, want for themselves.
10. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris: Also on the Orange Prize longlist, this jewel of a book perfectly captures the voice of its Scottish, Victorian-era (unreliable) narrator, 35-year-old nosy spinster Harriet Baxter. Harriet, living on her own and with a small income that allows her to be a patron of the arts (as she would put it), endeavors to set the story straight for us about her relationship with the members of the Gillespie family, to whom a great tragedy has befallen (although it takes Harriet awhile to spit out the details). By the time she is out with it, however, her story begins to look more like something by Wilkie Collins than the gentle memoirs of a thoughtful family friend. Interspersing the story of her friendship with dashing young artist Ned Gillespie with her present life as an elderly woman in a mysterious stand-off with a possibly deranged maid, Harriet keeps readers under her thumb, revealing only what she wants us to see – but with an occasional slip. This is chilling, masterful, psychological drama at its best. For fans of Iain Pears’s The Portrait or Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture.

Previous lists:

• Favourite adult books of 2011
• Favourite adult books of 2010

Favourite adult books of 2011

The Meagre Tarmac: Stories by Clark Blaise - This was my year to read short stories, apparently; see Selecky, below.... Blaise has been on my must-read list for years, now, thanks to Professor Dorsinville at McGill. I was intrigued especially by this recent book when I read that some characters in it made appearances in a novel by Blaise's wife (novelist Bharati Mukherjee). A review in the Globe, including the following excerpt from a previous work, clinched it:

"E.M. Forster, you ruined everything,” laments the narrator of a story from Clark Blaise’s first collection of short fiction, published almost 40 years ago. “Why must every visitor to India, every well-read tourist, expect a sudden transformation?”

..... a Forster reference?... how could I ignore Blaise any longer?

This collection of stories focuses on immigrants arriving in North America from the Indian subcontinent. There are family secrets, schisms, skeletons in the closet, and a fair bit of humour mixed in here as well. To quote the Globe again, Blaise's greatest strength here is his "ingenious use of this hybrid form (in which the reader knows characters through other stories in a way the characters themselves do not) to mirror the experience of the people he writes about: the Indian immigrants who are often entangled in several stories – several histories – simultaneously."

Half-blood Blues by Esi Edugyan - Reading this made me miss reading James Baldwin; it made me want to dig out Go Tell It On The Mountain or "Sonny's blues." I'm not saying it's that good, but it has definite promise. The novel itself interweaves two storylines, as well as the drama of World War II in Europe, the jazz age, and even includes a passing reference to Montreal. In the core storyline, jazz bassist Sidney “Sid” Griffiths reflects back on life as a good, not great, musician, and discovers some surprising news about a wartime colleague, the young mixed-race trumpeter Hieronymus “Hiero” Falk. The second strand of the narrative is set in Berlin and Paris in 1940, and finds Hiero, Sid and their friends making (what later becomes) musical history to the backdrop of increasing racism and the rise of the Third Reich in Paris and Berlin. Compelling reading.

Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt - Scroll down to the last entry in this blog post for a full review.

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan - This is my 2011 un-put-down-able title!!! Seriously, thanks a lot Sharron (said sarcastically) - I couldn't concentrate at work all day one day because I was halfway through this and couldn't stop thinking about it! This is a re-writing of The Scarlet Letter, set in a dystopian future. The southern United States have devolved into a radically conservative society, in which criminals are punished not by jail time, but by having their skin dyed a certain colour (based on the seriousness of their crime). Our narrator, Hannah Payne, is a murderer (of her unborn child, the product of a relationship she refuses to tell the authorities about), and is therefore a Red when she wakes up from "surgery." Forced to live on society's fringes, desperate to re-connect with her family and her lover, Hannah has to make some tough choices about her past, her religious beliefs, and her future. Extra credit to the author for planting a sympathetic, progressive woman minister near the end of the book.

Heads You Lose by Lisa Lutz - You might know Lisa Lutz from the funny and dark Spellman mysteries; Heads you lose is also a mystery, this time co-authored by her ex-boyfriend, David Hayward. Lutz and Hayward have a history of, shall we say, disagreeing .... They begin to co-author with the intent to alternate chapters, offering feedback on the previous chapter at the same time. The book is ostensibly about siblings Paul and Lacey Hansen, a pot-growing pair of 20somethings. When they find a headless corpse on their property, they decide to move the body to avoid having the police discover their grow-up. One thing, and one body, leads to another.... Meanwhile, authors David and Lisa are busy dragging their old baggage out of the closet. Before long, they are arguing in the footnotes and killing off one another’s favourite characters. It's hard to decide which plot was more interesting – or absurd! This one is NOT for readers who want their stories tied up with tidy bows.

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai - A 20something children's librarian, unsure what to do with her adult life, embarks on an impromptu roadtrip (or is it a kidnapping?) with one of her young patrons, a boy with an unhappy home life. Who is leading who in this adventure....? And why are they being followed? A funny, strange, and oddly warm and fuzzy read. Bonus points for chapter headings based on classic children's novels.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain - I totally didn't want to read this, because I read A Moveable Feast in my mid-teens and was highly influenced by it. I was afraid that this novel would ruin the picture I had in my head of the time that Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, spent in Paris in the 1920s. I shouldn't have been worried - the novel captures Hadley's voice wonderfully, and presents a nuanced, complicated, and ultimately somehow uplifting portraits of the early days of a highly influential woman ... and her husband.

Where Children Sleep by James Mollison - A photo essay book consisting of portraits of children and their "bedrooms;" at left, Ahkohxet from Brazil, and his sleeping quarters. Mollison intended the book to be an exploration of children's rights from a different perspective. Deeply, deeply moving, and surprising in both wonderful and appalling ways.

This Cake Is for the Party: Stories by Sarah Selecky - I'm very proud of myself for reading two short story collections this year. Read my full review of Selecky's book here.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson - The titular Major lives in a cozy English town and has lef a fairly traditional, straight life, in keeping with his military training and his organised nature. His well-ordered life goes a bit off the rails, however, when he befriends Ms. Ali, a local shopkeeper. Before long, he is mixed up in all kinds of domestic drama, and the other townspeople are flummoxed by the new Major, with new friends and new opinions (or, frankly, any opinions). Adorable romance for the literate type who enjoyed Old Filth, with less of an edge.

(Favourite adult books of 2010 list here).