My 2009 in Books

So in comparison to last year’s list, this one comes up a little short. It’s a tad disappointing, but also has something to do with a busier work and social life, which I suppose is a plus.

Once again I’ll provide the full run down of books, along with one favourite from each section (with the usual disclaimer that this is, of course, IMHO, and that these are not books published in the last year, but rather within the anachronistic JK reading time line):

Novel: The Hours, by Michael Cunningham

Non-Fiction: One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, by Rebecca Mead

YA/Children’s: His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Philip Pullman

Now with those special mentions aside, here’s the full parade, with links to the reviews where applicable.

Novels:

• Adamson, Gil, The Outlander
• Atwood, Margaret, The Year of the Flood
• Comeau, Joey, Overqualified
• Coupland, Douglas, The Gum Thief
• Cunningham, Michael, The Hours
  
• Davies, Robertson, The Fifth Business
• Dickner, Nicolas, Nikolski
• Echilin, Kim, The Disappeared
• Findley, Timothy The Wars
• Francis, Brian, Fruit
• Frazier, Charles, Cold Mountain
  
• Galloway, Stephen, The Cellist of Sarajevo
  
• Gowdy, Barbara, We So Seldom Look on Love
• Gulland, Sandra, Mistress of the Sun
  
• Hay, Sheridan, The Secret of Lost Things
• Humphreys, Helen, The Frozen Thames
• Itani, Frances, Deafening
• Irving, John, Until I Find You
• Jones, Lloyd, Master Pip
• Krauss, Nicole, The History of Love
  
• Lawson, Mary, Crow Lake
  
• Lodato, Victor, Mathilda Savitch
• McEwan, Ian, On Chesil Beach
• Meyer, Stephenie, The Host
• Michaels, Anne, The Winter Vault
  
• Moore, Lisa, February
  
• Nielsen, Susin, Word Nerd
• Niffenegger, Audrey, Her Fearful Symmetry
• Nemirovsky, Irene, Suite Francaise
• Pyper, Andrew, The Killing Circle
  
• Phillips, Marie, Gods Behaving Badly
• Quarrington, Paul, King Leary
  
• Redekop, Corey Shelf Monkey
  
• Richards, David Adams, Mercy Among the Children
• Rushdie, Salman, The Enchantress of Florence
  
• Saramago, Jose, Blindness
• Schlink, Bernhard, The Reader
  
• Shaffer, Ann & Annie Barrows, The Guersney Literary and Potato Peel Society
• Toews, Miriam The Flying Troutmans
• Tremblay, Michel, The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant
• Urquhart, Jane, Changing Heaven
  
• Walls, Jeannette, The Glass Castle
• Wallner, Michael, April in Paris
• Winterson, Jeannette, Lighthousekeeping
  
• Winterson, Jeanette, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
• Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway
• Zafon, Carlos Luis, The Shadow of the Wind
  

Non-Fiction

• Angus, Colin, Beyond the Horizon
• Calhoun, Crissy, Spotted: Your One and Only Unofficial Guide to Gossip Girl
• Cody, Diablo, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper
• Lander, Christian, Stuff White People Like
• Leonardo, Tony et al., Ultimate: The First Four Decades
  
• Mead, Rebecca, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding
• Pausch, Randy & Jeffrey Zaslow, The Last Lecture
• Schneider, Jason, Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music
• Ulrich, Louise Thatcher, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Short Fiction

• Adamson, Gil, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau
• Gaiman, Neil, Fragile Things

Poetry

• Michaels, Anne, Skin Divers

Children’s & YA

• Fagan, Cary & Nicholas Debon, Thing Thing
• Lewis, C.S., The Horse and His Boy
• Pullman, Philip, The Golden Compass
• Pullman, Philip, The Subtle Knife
• Pullman, Philip, The Amber Spyglass
  
• Rennison, Louise, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging
• Rennison, Louise, On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God
• Rennison, Louise, Knocked Out By My Nunga Nungas
• Rennison, Louise, Dancing in My Nuddy Pants
  
• Tamaki, Mariko & Jillian Tamaki, Skim
• Wolff, Frieda & Harriet May Savitz, illust. Elena Oriozola, The Story Blanket

So there it is, a fair amount shorter than last year, though certainly with fewer picture books making the cut (which I generally restricted to ones I own). It was still a satisfying list in books, with really only a couple on that list I would call really disappointing.

Goals for next year? I’d like to kick those numbers back up, and explore some new genres. I read my first graphic novel and will follow with more of those, and I’ve got Robert Sawyer’s Flashforward on deck as a foray into non-canonized sci-fi. This year I’ll also be making a concerted effort to read more books by Canadian small presses, which often get overshadowed by bigger advertising budgets (and my admitted inclination for the Vintage imprint).

It was also a good year for the KIRBC. With almost 90 reviews under my belt, yours truly is still alive and kicking in the blogosphere, and a big thank you goes to Cheese for her contributions to the blog, and for being a gracious hostess for IRL meetings. I had a grand ol’ time with last year’s Canada Reads debate, and look forward to more lively and engaging discussions online and over the airwaves this year.

Thanks to everyone who spent some time Keepin’ It Real, either online, or IRL. Hope to see more of you in the new year!

JK

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To e, or not to e?

We’re talking about readers, not ravers, here of course.  Here’s the down-low: my stepdad won a Sony ebook reader (a Sony Reader PRS 550 to be precise) at a conference, and passed it on to me, saying I could use it or sell it. That was a month ago, and I still haven’t decided.

I thought I was going to ebay the heck out of it (where it could fetch around $200), but I’ve been procrastinating, and ebook stares sadly at me from my coffee table. I should say that I’m not a hater – I’ve used both the Sony and the Kindle (v. 1.0) before. I certainly preferred the Kindle, on which I read about half of Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (and So Can You!) before having to return it (Reading this book was an interesting choice, for upon getting the print copy from the library, I discovered that Colbert’s “asides” were actually meant to be read alongside the  text, but the Kindle couldn’t handle this kind of format. Consequently, the nature of those interjections was changed). But that said, as the readers were easier to prop up than a book it was convenient in bed, and you can’t argue with the portability factor. Furthermore, since I work in books, I feel like actually having an using an ebook reader would help keep me abreast of the technology.

But here’s the thing – I can’t see myself ever buying an ebook. Sure, you can get some free online from places like Project Gutenburg, but unless you’re going to pirate (an option that offers a far smaller selection than music torrenting, besides the whole illegal thing), you’re back to buying new releases, which can be up to 50-75% of the retail price of a book. For a file. A file that you can’t hold, smell, or arrange on your shelves. That if technology advances too fast, you might not be able to access one day. And for more points against the Sony, it doesn’t have wireless capabilities, so if, as they would like you to think, you’re hit with an intense need to have Atmospheric Disturbances IMMEDIATELY, you’d still have to wait until you went home and upload manually. And so, even with retailers tripping all over themselves to offer digital books (Chapters/Indigo launched its Shortcovers program only two weeks ago, though this seems geared to “mobile devices” and online reading, rather than ebook reading) and ebook sales increasing all the time, I just don’t know if I can make the leap.

I am more convinced by being able to read ebooks on an existing device like an iphone (which I am eons away from having after just having rejoined the cell phone world begrudgingly), or an itouch using the Stanza application. Then you’re not lugging around another expensive device (which I would be afraid of losing, breaking or having stolen), and if you want to keep a couple “in case of emergency” books on it, so be it. On Thursday, I saw a demonstration of the new ebook app for the iphone and I was fairly impressed, although I’m still not sold on reading War & Peace about two sentences at a time.

So , dear readers, what would you do? Have you jumped on the ebook party train at all?

Also, like this techy stuff? You can look forward to semi-regular doses of bookish technology, thanks to our new part android-correspondent, one Sarah “Cheese” Labrie, and some tentative technological forays by yours truly. Keep your RSS tuned in.

Love the shortcovers website art. This is how I'd like to imagine myself reading in the city (if I had Serena van der Woodsen bohemian good looks).

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A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel

As a lover of both history and reading, I was excited to read this book. I’d also already read Manguel’s The Library at Night, and highly enjoyed it. To me, Manguel himself is a stunning ideal – eloquent, erudite, fluent in four languages, and most importantly, incredibly passionate about books. In the first few pages of A History of Reading, you know you’ve found a kindred spirit:

We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

There could not be a more perfect guide for a tour through reading, books and the world of the word.  Manguel approaches this gargantuan topic thematically, rather than chronologically, eschewing hierarchy and an illusory linear narrative. This is not “The” history, but “A” history – just a few of the possible stories about storytelling.  For this is not a history of statistics and trends, but rather of people — of other impassioned book lovers in history. Over ten years of research went into the making of the book, and one always has the sense that Manguel would gladly go on writing it forever (he admits as much in the last chapter). The book is both academic and anecdotal, ambling along and revelling in its tangents (if it can be said to be tangential without a central narrative). It demands patience of its reader, which admittedly, sometimes exceeded my own. It reads like pulling books off shelves, peeking into each one for just a glimpse of the story.

I was disappointed to see less of Manguel’s own life in this work, though the times when he does discuss his own bibliophilia are some of the most endearing of the book. Take the following passage, which I’ll quote at length (I’m sure Manguel would approve):

I wonder, as I have wondered every other time, why I keep so many books that I know I will not read again. I tell myself that, every time I get rid of a book, I find a few days later that this is precisely the book I’m looking for. I tell myself that there are no books (or very, very few) in which I have found nothing at all to interest me. I tell myself that I’ve brought them into my house for a reason in the first place, and that this reason may hold good again in the future. I invoke excuses of thoroughness, of scarcity, of faint scholarship. But I know the main reason I hold onto this ever-increasing hoard is a sort of voluptuous greed. I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves, full of more or less familiar names. I delight in knowing that I’m surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life, with intimations of my future.

I don’t think I’ve ever had my own book-lust expressed so clearly and so beautifully (You’ll note my

My History of Reading

bookshelves to the right, which I know will need expanding soon. I am glad for now it is only a matter of adding shelves and not rooms.) I’ve often compared books to lovers (though really, they’re more dependable than any partner), and they are certainly the love of my life.  And this certainly seems to be the case for Manguel, making his sometimes tiring digressions eccentrically endearing. This is not a quick read, or a particularly easy one, but rather one that acts like a religious pilgrimage, cultivating the patience and curiosity that are perhaps waning in an age of instant gratification. It introduces you to a many colourful family members you didn’t know you had.

I think I’ll conclude with another irresistible passage that Manguel quotes from one of my favourite authors, Virginia Woolf:

I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperisbale marble — the Almigty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.’

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