Reading Journal: The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt (2011)

Perhaps the most unusual book to win the Governor-General’s Award since Bear (Marian Engel, 1976), DeWitt’s second novel takes the violence of a Cormac McCarthy and fuses it with the comic style of a Charles Portis, to the point that some scenes resemble the cartoony violence of Monty Python or South Park. Though it’s a “genre book,” The Sisters Brothers acquits itself well as literature, too, telling a rather traditional story about a man hunt, and brotherhood, and the ethical challenges an emerging conscience would pose to your average mercenary. It’s incredibly difficult to put this book down, and stylistically, it exploits a few simple tricks to create a brilliant voice that’s funny but that doesn’t discount the gravity of the situation. It's a book that I already know will be hard to top on my year-end list, and an absolute must-read if you liked True Grit or True History of the Kelly Gang.

Reading Journal: Ladies and Gentlemen, by Adam Ross (2011)

A book I plucked off the shelf at random in my local library, and which I found to be one of the better short fiction collections I've read. Seven stories here, ranging from 20-50 pages, and all of them inviting and human and challenging. Ross knows exactly how long to linger in a scene, whether he's telling you about the strangest job interview ever (the opening story, "Futures," with a great twist that you'll feel like you should've seen coming but will still surprise you), or a first love at the age of 13 ("Middleman"). The set ranges from the harder-edged "When In Rome" - about getting mixed up with the small-time crooks your brother hangs around - to the domestic "In the Basement" - about that college friend who gives it all up just to get married - and in all the stories, finely drawn characters face tough choices and make strange moves that generally seem justified. Ross's narrative voice is confident and his prose is smooth, never distracting with gimmicks or lyrics and always letting the story reign supreme. I highly recommend this collection, and I can already feel it informing my work.

Reading Journal: Moonlight Mile, by Dennis Lehane (2010)

The sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone comes in at about half of its predecessor's length, and much thinner on story. Some of the excesses of the first installment were done away with, but as must any book in a series, this volume burns a lot of early pages catching up backstory, which stalled the book's ability to get its hooks into me. Lehane's prose is as clean and quick-reading as it's ever been, though, and when the action does finally pick up, the book comes to a whirlwind conclusion - breathless, if a bit contrived, and giving us a sense of what will happen to Amanda (GBG's abductee), complete with a side of Russian gangsters, which (eventually) makes for an exciting read. Best of all, the ending is one that will allow Kenzie to come back to us a very different man... or, one that could equally allow Lehane to abandon this series altogether and try something new.

Reading Journal: Off Book, by Mark Sampson (2007)

A world-beating debut that must have some truth in it, about a young writer named Cameron from rural Nova Scotia who attends King's College (Halifax) then moves to an unnamed prairie city, where instead of following his passion and writing plays, he begins crunching code for a web start up. Sampson himself, from Prince Edward Island - where one of Cameron's girlfriends comes from, one whose home we visit in the novel - attended King's, then the University of Manitoba (in Winnipeg). What he has produced here is a seeming hybrid of the academic novel and the bildungsroman, in which he often lays bare the device, referencing the process of writing frequently as well as the coming-of-age archetypes. The novel, the last book now-defunct Norwood Publishing produced, has a quite a few editing errors - spelling, doubled words, missing indents, tense errors - but the story is nevertheless profluent, and stocked with believable characters. It's over 360 pages long and tightly packed, and though I was working through several other books at the time, I kept wanting to come back to this one. Engaging story in functional - if occasionally a touch stiff - prose that reads quickly, but that also makes you think, as you recognize the types Sampson is employing to tell this ambitious story and discover the Kroetsch-ian leanings of the style the writer character develops. I really enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to his next novel, Sad Peninsula, from which The Quint, (University College of the North, Thompson, MB), has published an excerpt that you can read here.

Reading Journal: King Leary, by Paul Quarrington (1987)

A Leacock Medal for Humour and Canada Reads winner, King Leary tells of an old-time (1910-1930, roughly) NHLer much more like King Clancy than King Lear. The plot revolves around the King's upcoming trip to film a ginger ale commercial in Toronto with Duane Killebrew, the record-shattering phenom clearly based on Wayne Gretzky. Overall, the book is audacious, and peppered with funny moments, but I struggled with the diction. Sometimes we were in the 1920s, and others, we were in Southern Gothic. And it took a long time for the main story to ramp up, about 100 pages - nearly half of the book. I was really hoping to laugh more, but with no chapters longer than about 10 pages, and because of the book's shifting chronology - sometimes in the present, sometimes in flashback, generally flipping one chapter at a time - it was hard to get deep enough into any given character or storyline for the humour or pathos of the situations to rise up. A great idea, but unfortunately, a book that I found too easy to read distractedly.

My Top Ten Reads in 2011/Review: Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby

If you follow me on Facebook, then you know that I dispatch quarterly about the books I've read, in some form of hybrid micro-review/reading journal enterprise.

Of the 74 I got through in 2011, these were my 10 best reads.

10. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie (1993)
09. And Also Sharks, by Jessica Westhead (2011)
08. July, July, by Tim O'Brien (2002)
07. My White Planet, by Mark Anthony Jarman (2008)
06. The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink (1995)
05. Post Office, by Charles Bukowski (1971)
04. Taxi!, by Helen Potrebenko (1975)
03. Room, by Emma Donoghue (2010)
02. Barney's Version, by Mordecai Richler (1997)
01. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (1984)

The quarterly wrap ups will continue on my Facebook page, but as of now, I will also be posting the reviews here, on my blog, one at a time. Here's the first:

Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby (2009)
A work of genius, to an extent, as Hornby has his finger squarely on the lonely, obsessive enterprise that music fandom has become, updating High Fidelity in the wake of the Internet much like Douglas Coupland's JPod was an update on Microserfs. The novel gives us three characters: childless (1) Annie, who's been with slacker and obsessive fan of (2) Tucker Crowe, (3) Duncan, for 15 years, in a holding pattern in a dreary English seaside town. Duncan runs an Internet fan board re: Tucker, who for his part, hasn't released an album in two decades, and is holed up in Pennsylvania with his most recent illegitimate child and its mother. When Tucker's hit album, Juliet, is re-released minus its production values (as Juliet, Naked - Beatles' Let it Be in 2003, anyone?), Annie's decision to listen to it first (without Duncan), and her difference of opinion as to whether it's better than the original, kicks off a sequence of events that makes her and Duncan rethink their relationship. I really liked the first 5/8 (250 pages out of around 400), but - slight spoiler - when Tucker himself enters the story, the focus changes, and though rooting for Annie (and, as with all Hornby male protagonists, only sort of rooting for Duncan to get his shit together), I much preferred Tucker in absence than in presence; the story sags as the window opens further into his life. That said, I demolished this book: started on a Thursday night, finished Saturday morning. An entertaining read that only misses the mark when the author plays away from his strengths (i.e., writing about fandom), it may nevertheless be Hornby's best.

Merry Christmas... to me? No, to you!

With December drawing to a close, and an embarrassing number of OAC Writers' Reserve Grant applications sent, and my first story ever accepted for publication finally in print (in The Nashwaak Review), and a few hours already spent during my two weeks off work for Christmas/writing (mostly writing), I came back today from the café down the street where I do a lot of editing - currently, I'm well into Year Two of my battle with a story called "The Seven Confessions of Constable Tom Burford", from Projections, and it's turned a corner this month - and I found an envelope in my mail from NōD Magazine, the undergraduate English publication at the University of Calgary, to which I sent my very short story, "Respect" (since retitled "Funeral," though I may change it back now), in April, for their Deface theme issue. Inside the envelope was no letter, no information slip, nor even a subscription order form, just this, (great cover), with my story at the very bottom of the table of contents! I guess it launched in October, according to their Facebook page.

I had inquired about the story by email, with no response, and was already sending it elsewhere (I have been for a while). What a great Christmas gift - much nicer than the "Please withdraw" emails I've now got to start sending. I'll be sure to send a thank you, too... a card, by lettermail, this time!

There are still submissions pending, and of course, the 15 stories that ought to make up Projections aren't all finished yet, but to my mind, this brings 2011 to a perfect ending. In my first year out there, I've published nine stories - seven from what will be my first book - and enjoyed the support of so many friends (over 100 of you on my Facebook page), and colleagues, and, strangest of all, editors and "real" writers, who have published books and everything, who've welcomed me as one of their own - even when they've not accepted my work. Thank you all for a wonderful year, and have a great holiday. I'll be back in 2012!