My 10 Favourite Books

I'm on a new team at the Edmonton Public Library: the Great Stuff Crew. Our job is to promote the great content we've got in the library collection -- books, movies, music, games, digital delights -- the whole breadth and depth of it. We'll be doing this primarily online, via the EPL website.

As a way of introducing ourselves to the public, crew members have been asked to come up with a list of our ten favourite books (or other materials). Only ten? Impossible!

This is my list of three dozen, in alphabetical order by title, leaving out many, many, many favourites. I've included links to my reviews on this blog.

The 10 PM Question. Kate De Goldi
Autobiography of Red. Anne Carson
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives: Stories. Zsuzsi Gartner
The Botany of Desire. Michael Pollan
Carry the One. Carol Anshaw
Cereus Blooms at Night. Shani Mootoo
Chime. Franny Billingsley
A Country Year: Living the Questions. Sue Hubbell

I'm reading something by China Mieville here... which
reminds me that the audiobook of his City and the City
(narrated by John Lee) is another favourite. Oh dear!

Exit Wounds. Rutu Modan
Fall on Your Knees. Ann-Marie MacDonald
Fugitive Pieces. Anne Michaels
Fun Home. Alison Bechdel
How I Live Now. Meg Rosoff
How to Heal a Broken Wing. Bob Graham
I Want My Hat Back. Jon Klassen
Jinx. Margaret Wild
The Lesser Blessed. Richard Van Camp
Lighthousekeeping. Jeanette Winterson
The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches. Gaetan Soucy
The Lost Garden. Helen Humphreys
Monkey Beach. Eden Robinson
Mr and Mrs Bunny, Detectives Extraordinaire. Polly Horvath
Packing for Mars. Mary Roach
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard
The Pull of the Ocean. Jean-Claude Mourlevat
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. Susan Cain
Skellig. David Almond
Skim. Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Stitches. David Small
Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You. Peter Cameron
The Summer Book. Tove Jansson
There But For The. Ali Smith
True Grit. Charles Portis. audiobook narrated by Donna Tartt
A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan
West Wind. Mary Oliver
When Women Were Birds. Terry Tempest Williams
Why We Broke Up. Daniel Handler

Some of my most favourite authors -- Kate Atkinson, Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland, Carol Ann Duffy, John Green, Sonya Hartnett, A.S. King, Margo Lanagan, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje (that's another ten right there) -- aren't on this list because it was too hard to choose only one of their books. How could I ever only pick ten?

Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland

Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's demented and satirical new novel. The man of the title is Raymond Gunt, a British cameraman hired to film an American Survivor-style reality TV show in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. He's a boorish horndog adept at offending and alienating everyone around him. Worst. Person. Ever. is as outrageous as it is hilarious.

Imagine every obnoxious person you've ever met, all rolled into one, and you've got the greatest anti-hero ever. I even found myself agreeing with Raymond sometimes, like when he describes processed foods as "overpackaged chemical goatfuckings manufactured in the same factories that make dildos and pesticides." (Not the particular phrasing I would have chosen, but I'm sympathetic to the sentiment.)

The novel rockets along from one misadventure to another. It's entirely in dialogue, counting Raymond's first-person narration.

"I like to think of myself as a giving, caring person who really does think about the modern world -- someone who tries to improve the planet, even though it seems pretty much doomed. As a consequence, maybe I'm not fully qualified to pass judgment on the diet of most Americans. But as I stood there staring at the shit-coated guano logs and repulsive cans of room-temperature weasel piss in the airport vending machines, I was appalled. 'Come on, America, you're living creatures, not science experiments.'
[...]
'Ray, I don't think there's anything in there we could actually put in our bodies.'
Still we scanned the grids of toxins wrapped in bright paper and the cans of sugary blight.
'Look!' Neal was pointing, with a heartbreaking note of hope in his voice. 'Look at that bar there -- it's got peanuts in it. That's food.'
'Probably tastes like a pocket calculator garnished with dried herpes juice flakes.'"

I don't think other readers will have wishy-washy reactions -- you'll either love it or hate it. I loved it.

Sporks and knoons are among the newfangled
cutlery featured in Worst. Person. Ever.
(Image from the flyleaf,
Random House Canada edition.)

Readalike (minus the profanity): Beauty Queens (Libba Bray).

See also other books by Coupland that I've reviewed: Generation A; Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People; and Eleanor Rigby.

Fools by Joan Silber

The six finely-crafted stories in Joan Silber's Fools are about anarchists, our better natures and our worst. New York Marxists in the 1920s, conscientious objectors imprisoned during WWII, the Occupy Wall Street movement -- I love the way they are all loosely interconnected, with characters and places from one story popping up tangentially in another.

The stories are around 40 pages long, enough time to really get into the characters, their lives, and the many possibilities there are for learning from one's folly.

The title story opens with these lines:

" A lot of people thought anarchists were fools. I finished high school in 1924, and even during my girlhood, when the fiercest wing of anarchists still believed in "propaganda by deed" and threw bombs and shot at world leaders, people thought they did it out of a bloody kind of sappiness, a laughable naivete. All this laughing, I came to think, ignored the number of things a person could be a fool for in this life -- a fool for love, a fool for Christ, a fool for admiration. I had friends who were all of these, as it turned out. But I took my own route."

What struggles we have in making our actions congruent with our ideals. Fools is an enthralling collection.

Readalikes: Runaway (Alice Munro); Bobcat (Rebecca Lee); The Imperfectionists (Tom Rachman).

A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett

I love this cover.

I listened to the latest Book Riot podcast this morning (episode 26, That's Verbatim, Baby) and heard Rebecca Schinsky talk about a book that made her weep uncontrollably on an airplane (The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien). It reminded me that last month I listened to A House in the Sky, a memoir co-written by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett. If you haven't already heard about her, Lindhout was kidnapped while working as a freelance journalist in Somalia and held captive for 15 months.

I'm not loving the Midwest Tape
audio edition cover. I wouldn't
have picked it up if I hadn't already
heard about the book and knew
I wanted to read it.

On the eve of my departure for the Vancouver Writers Fest, I realized that I had only about 45 minutes left before the end of the audiobook [Simon & Schuster: 13 hours total: read by Lindhout herself]. I considered saving it for the waiting lounge, as it would be about the right length of time, and then I could start a new book once the plane was in the air and the restriction on using electronic devices was lifted. I'm glad that I decided instead to finish it at home before I left, because the most harrowing parts are in that final section. I cried. I was glad that I was not in a public place.

The earlier parts of the book explain why Lindhout was in Somalia in the first place. Her motivations start with her childhood in Sylvan Lake, Alberta, where she escaped her dysfunctional family situation by reading secondhand National Geographic magazines. She moved to Calgary after high school and worked as a waitress until she had enough money to travel for the first time. Lindhout was hooked on travel to exotic locations and repeatedly returned to work in Calgary only long enough to save for another extended trip. I also love to travel, so I was sympathetic, even though I would never choose to go anywhere near a war zone or other dangerous places.

Lindhout maintained her sanity through 460 days of captivity in Somalia. It is a remarkable and memorable story.

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

My garden today, Nov 4 2013.
(Photo by Laurie MacFayden)

We've just had our first big snow in Edmonton, so the atmosphere here is right for a historical mystery set in Iceland. Australian author Hannah Kent based her debut novel, Burial Rites, on historical fact. In 1830, Agnes Magnusdottir was the last person to be executed in Iceland.

After being convicted of murder and sentenced to have her head chopped off, Agnes spends more than a year waiting for her execution. A farm family is assigned the responsibility of keeping her while she waits. Agnes shares their tiny croft for many months, working side by side with uneasy family members. She is frequently visited by a young priest whose task is to bring her to God before she dies.

The narrative shifts comfortably between different points of view, but Agnes is the only character given first-person voice. According to the author's note, "many of the letters, documents and extracts presented at the beginning of each chapter have been translated and adapted from original sources." I was struck by one in particular, in which the district commissioner protests the unforeseen cost of the executioner's axe -- nearly six times higher than expected -- and the resulting strain on his budget.

The events leading up to the night of the double murder and arson, and what role Agnes played in it, are slowly revealed. Along the way, we get to know some fascinating people and their way of life. (A glass of whey, anyone? How about some pickled whale? Don't mind all that dirt on the bed; it's just that our sod walls are crumbling.)

I really enjoyed Burial Rites. It also made me thankful for central heating.

Readalikes: The Colour of Milk (Nell Leyshon); The Tenderness of Wolves (Stef Penney); Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood).

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel by David Rakoff

David Rakoff's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish juggles an impressive cast of characters while sweeping across the history and landscape of the USA. It is playfully -- and concisely -- written in rhyming couplets.

On top of all that, the book design is striking. It's a collectible artifact designed by Chip Kidd. Diecut holes in a thick board cover reveal the title printed on the page underneath. The text is illustrated with full-page art by Seth. It's an inspired match. Seth's portraits have a double edge -- cartoonish, yet sombre -- that works perfectly with Rakoff's campy style and his luckless characters.

Here's a sample from one of the sections about Susan/Sloan/Shulamit, who keeps reinventing herself over time:

A maximal, turbo-charged, top-drawer milieu --
Appealed to a moneyed crowd of locals who
Insisted on only the toppest of drawers,
Weddings befitting of Louis Quatorze.

Clifford is also followed across the years, from childhood through to his death on the vanguard of the AIDS epidemic. Knowing that Rakoff was dying of cancer when he wrote this book added poignancy as I read his words:

A new fierce attachment to all of this world
Now pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurled
Lightning bolt lancing him, sent from above,
Left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.

LDMDCP was published posthumously. (I reviewed Half Empty when Rakoff died last year.) Rakoff was a warm and funny writer and I am sad that he is gone.

Readalikes: The Wild Party (Joseph Moncure March and Art Spiegelman); George Sprott (Seth); Building Stories (Chris Ware); and maybe Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin) as well.

Wormholes (not the science fiction kind)

There may be wormholes
in this sculpture that I saw
in Slovakia, but even if
there aren't, I thought it
would be more appealing
than an image of worms.

Three different passages about wormholes in three different literary novels in one week. Weird! Wormholes show up fairly often in books and films about space travel but I can't remember encountering them in literary fiction before. Must have been a space-time convergence in my reading world.

These are the relevant passages:

"When I came in, my mother was on her knees next to the kitchen table, in her underwear, intent on photographing a hole that the woodworms had left in our table." (P 13, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, Viola Di Grado.)

"bookworms had begun to consume the paper and I would be set to tracing the wormholes to get rid of the pests" (P 33, The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo.)

"I invent private exercises, count the holes the woodworms have worm-eaten out of the window frames over the centuries and centuries, amen, so the hours go by faster." (Chapter 2, The First True Lie, Marina Mander, from advance review e-book access thanks to Hogarth, the publisher; I'll review it in January when the book is released.)

Don't you love this kind of synchronicity? Anyone else have examples of wormholes in literary fiction?

Note added November 3, 2013. More woodworms, this time in non-fiction.  I'm going to quote a longish passage because it is so odd:

"In 1499 some sparrows were excommunicated for depositing droppings on the pews in St Vincent, in France. In 1546 a band of weevils were tried for damaging church vineyards in St Julien. Such trials were rife in the sixteenth century, and the distinguished French lawyer Bartholomew Chassenee rose to fame as an advocate for animals. His work is commemorated in Julian Barnes's mischievous short story 'The Wars of Religion,' in which excommunication is sought for a colony of woodworm which had gnawed away the supporting legs of the Bishop of Besancon's throne, causing him to be 'hurled against his will into a state of imbecility.' Chassenee negotiates a gentler outcome for the insects. They are excused punishment, provided the local inhabitants 'set aside for the said bestioles alternative pasture, where they may graze peacefully without future harm to the church of St Michel." (P 70, Weeds by Richard Mabey.)