Creating lists of the year’s best books is an annual ritual in which I am frequently asked to participate. These requests never fail to make me uncomfortable: such judgments ultimately come down to matters of individual taste, and in any case, it is impossible for one person to read the sum total of books published in a calendar year, and therefore to make an informed decision as to what constitutes the best.
It is possible, however, to look back on a year’s worth of reading and identify a handful of books that rose above the pack, books that proved more affecting, more memorable, or more enjoyable than the rest. Not necessarily the best, whatever that might mean, but a group of personal favourites. With that in mind, here are five books that made an impression on me in 2011.
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- It was like sex was in everything, writes Martha Schabas in her deeply unsettling first novel, lodged in men's heads and drowning in women's bodies. The thought is given to Georgia, a 14-year-old student at the Royal Toronto Ballet Academy, whose increasingly fraught and confusing reactions to her own burgeoning sexuality lead her into a horribly inappropriate and dangerous interaction with the academy's artistic director. Schabas is unforgiving in her examination of the way sex and ballet collide, often with terrible consequences for the young women who are too innocent to comprehend the nature of the forces they are trafficking in. No lazy moralist, Schabas lays bare the misunderstandings and insensitivities on all sides: the well-meaning adults who want nothing more than to help Georgia in large part end up making things much worse. The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa once said that being an artist means never averting your eyes. Schabas, to her enduring credit, resolutely refuses to do just that.
- Various Positions, Martha Schabas (Doubleday Canada)
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- David McGimpsey's poetry tends to offend the snotty aesthetes of the Canadian literati, in part because it dares to traffic in the detritus of low culture: Snooki, Justin Bieber, AC/DC, and Rebecca Black are all name-checked in his most recent book, a semi-autobiographical picaresque composed of 128 chubby sonnets “ 16 lines rather than the classical 14. The same charge has been levied against Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i> and the films of Tarantino, but like those works, McGimpsey's unruly, uncontained poems marry formal ingenuity and a raucous, hilarious sensibility. He's also unafraid to poke at the eyes of our more inflated literary pretensions: At last year's prestigious Ho-Lit awards / I won the coveted Layton Medallion / (rhymes with ˜Canadian Stallion'). That he can seamlessly transition from this kind of thing to the emotional gut punch of What Was That Poem?, about a mother's death, only proves McGimpsey's masterful versatility and confidence.
- Li'l Bastard, David McGimpsey (Coach House Books)
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- Well before the forces of Occupy Vancouver staked out their territory in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Michael Christie was giving voice to the lonely and disaffected denizens of the city's Downtown Eastside. His suite of stories set in and around that troubled neighbourhood focuses on the downtrodden “ addicts and schizophrenics, the homeless and unwanted. The stories in <i>The Beggar's Garden</i> are spare and unsentimental, and dramatize the often desperate ways human beings strive for connection and succour in a world that seems intent on withholding both. This past year saw no shortage of strong collections of short fiction from Canadian writers; Christie's debut collection stands out as tough-minded and compassionate, precisely rendered and deeply felt.
- The Beggar's Garden, Michael Christie (HarperCollins Canada)
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- Lynn Coady's fourth novel, recently shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is her most stylistically ambitious to date. The story of hockey enforcer Gordon Rank Rankin's revenge on a former university classmate who has written a novel modelled on Rank's life simultaneously updates the epistolary novel for the Internet era and provides a striking example of one of fiction's most notoriously difficult figures: the unreliable narrator. It also solidifies Coady's reputation as one of this country's foremost chroniclers of the masculine psyche, particularly that part that is obsessed with violence as a problem-solving technique. What you can't account for, when you punch a person in the head, says Rank, is how they are going to land. Coady is a brilliant observer of both head shots and the various ways the recipients land. Oh, and she's also painfully funny.
- The Antagonist, Lynn Coady (House of Anansi Press)
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- Many of the people who have been singing the praises of Patrick deWitt for reconstituting the Western in his novel <i>The Sisters Brothers</i> ignore the fact that Guy Vanderhaeghe has been doing this for the past 15 years. True, Vanderhaeghe prefers to work on a more epic canvas than deWitt, but in the three novels that constitute his recently completed loose trilogy “ <i>The Englishman's Boy</i>, <i>The Last Crossing</i>, and now, <i>A Good Man</i> “ he has provided an interrogation of Western mythology every bit as powerful and revisionist as that of his Giller-nominated compatriot. <i>A Good Man</i> is easily the most ambitious book in the trilogy, and for my money, also the most entertaining. The characters “ from the cynical ex-soldier Wesley Case to the villainous hired gun Michael Dunne “ are as vibrant as ever, but <i>A Good Man</i> also boasts a strong political subtext, about the careful and ever tentative nature of the relationship between Canada and its bloodthirsty neighbour to the south. Vanderhaeghe's battle scenes are stunning (and more than a little violent), and he seamlessly incorporates historical events and figures into his fictional milieu. If deWitt is our Charles Portis, then Vanderhaeghe has a strong claim to being our Cormac McCarthy.
- A Good Man, Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland & Stewart)
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