A reader’s year: a personal rundown of 2011′s best books

Not intended as a definitive best-of list, what you see below should be taken instead as simply a roll-call of the reading highlights in the year of someone who spends a good deal of his waking hours with a book in his hands but cannot, being human, read absolutely everything. Note that not all the books mentioned were necessarily published in 2011. In cases where I’ve already written about the book, I’ve provided a link to the review.

Patrick deWitt and Esi Edugyan’s universally praised award winners notwithstanding, my two favourite Canadian novels this year were probably the under-rewarded Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien and The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor. Not to be forgotten, either, is Clark Blaise’s collection The Meagre Tarmac, wherein a writer’s writer excelled himself and got more attention than he has received in a long time, though still not as much as he deserves. Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table seems to have won over even the habitual Ondaatje fence-sitters, and rightly so–there’s simply nothing not to like about it.

On the international fiction front, I finally got to Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, all dazzlingly absorbing and highly individual works. Blue Metropolis star Amitav Ghosh delivered the second installment of his Opium Wars-inspired historical trilogy with the ridiculously enjoyable River of Smoke while Aravind Adiga’s Last Man In Tower shows that its author can stand alongside Rohinton Mistry as a chronicler of modern-day Mumbai. Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was probably my fastest 545-page read of the year, and though I am a baseball fan I cannot stress strongly enough that you don’t have to be a baseball fan at all to love this book. David Foster Wallace’s posthumous and unfinished The Pale King alternates long dazzling passages with equally long stretches that all but dare you to slam the book shut in exasperation. Which shouldn’t be surprising, considering the scattered state the manuscript was in when Foster Wallace died; if anything, TPK’s mere existence is a triumph of editing and curatorial diligence. Jeffrey Eugenides’ brilliant The Marriage Plot is, among many other things, the best and most moving portrayal of depression I’ve ever read. Testament to the strength of Julian Barnes‘ spare but fathomlessly deep The Sense of an Ending is that its Man Booker win raised nary a voice of objection. But if I had to name my single favourite novel  of 2011 it would be Ali Smith’s There but for the. Unaccountably passed over by the Booker long-listers, the novel is a literary high-wire act, audacious in its conception and pulled off with a deceptive ease. It could be called experimental but I’m afraid that might scare potential readers away from what is in fact a very readable book.

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny by Nile Rodgers was an out-of-the-blue amazement, working as both a fascinating story of growing up black at a watershed time in American history (and under family circumstances that have to be read to be believed) and as a whole new perspective from which to view the past forty years of pop music history. Simon Reynolds’ compulsively re-readable Retromania was a year-long talking point among pop obsessives, who could never quite seem to decide whether Reynolds’ scalpel-sharp dissection of today’s rear-view fixation is a condemnation or a celebration. In that very confusion, I suspect, might be Reynolds’ very point.

Sports-wise, I’ll have a full review of Scott Raab’s The Whore of Akron in The Gazette in a couple of weeks; for now, suffice to say that its standing as the most talked-about sports book of the year is fully deserved. The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and The End of America’s Childhood continues Jane Leavy’s baseball lit winning streak. High on the personal to-read list is Gare Joyce’s acclaimed The Devil and Bobby Hull: How Hockey’s Original Million Dollar Man Became the Game’s Lost Legend.

In a bumper year for graphic lit the two books that stand out most for me are Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions  and Chester Brown’s Paying For It. The former shows how well the graphic form can accommodate large-scale visions of personal genius (yes, I’m prepared to call Big Questions a work of genius); as for the latter, it would feel a bit odd to say that I “enjoyed” Brown’s raw and frank account of his experience with prostitutes, but it sure has stayed with me, and Brown is to be heartily applauded for his sheer contrariness in following up his bestselling Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography with a book whose appeal overlaps with its predecessor’s in no obvious way at all.

On the crime fiction tip my big (and, yes, late) discovery this year was former standup comedian Mark Billingham, who’s been around for a while but appears set for a leap in popularity with his not especially comedic Tom Thorne series, of which the newest is Good as Dead. Meanwhile, Ian Rankin shows with The Impossible Dead that he is doing just fine post-Rebus, his new mainstay Edinburgh cop Malcolm Fox showing every sign of being as enduring a figure as the old Inspector.

It came out in 2010, but Mordecai: The Life & Times by Charles Foran presided over 2011 for me: I enjoyed it so much I didn’t want it to end, so portioned out my sittings with it over much of the year. The nicely complementary Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin and Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist by Robert Douglas Fairhurst (both to be reviewed January 7th in The Gazette) made a figure too often sectioned off as “Victorian” feel remarkably contemporary. There’s going to be a lot of hype this year around Dickens’ 200th birthday that will have little to do with the complex man at the heart of it all; these two books–alongside, of course, your choice of the novels; this year I intend finally to get to Our Mutual Friend–will be the ideal counterbalance.

Finally, lovers of books for their own sake, and of the myriad rewards that reading brings, are urged to investigate This Is Not the End of The Book, wherein Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere conduct a dialogue on the fate of books and reading in the digital age, with detours into seemingly whatever pops into their minds at a given moment.  Reading it is like eavesdropping on the two eccentric gentlemen at the next table in your neighborhood cafe, except that these two happen to be a couple of towering intellects and omnivorous bibliophiles. I left feeling better about the future of books than I’ve felt in years.

Ian McGillis

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