I've been quite busy the last few days, so there was no time for me to do an end-of-year roundup of all the books I've read, nor was there really time to let you know what I've got in store for the coming year. I'll try to do both now.

Last year I launched a project called Reading 2007, for which I reviewed (well, sort of reviewed) every single book I read during the calendar year. I started out with the notion of doing serious reviews, but to be perfectly frank I don't see this blog as that serious a thing, so they eventually became more like impressionist rambles inspired by the books. I only made it through fifty-three books during the year, well below my average, but adult life certainly takes its toll on both the energy and the free time. I did find, though, that the project made me more aware of how I was choosing my reading material, and how making that information public would affect (effect? I never get that right) how others saw me. I had a good time, and I learned some things, and reader response was generally positive. I also joined The Canadian Book Challenge (follow the link to see what that's all about), which will continue probably well into the new year.

For the coming year, I'm going to do much the same, except of course I'm calling my major project Reading 2008. Here are a few of the titles I've got lined up:

• Dead Man's Float, by Nicholas Maes (in progress)
• Spook Country, by William Gibson
• The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro
• The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, by Susanna Clarke
• Trouble is My Business, by Raymond Chandler
• The Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov
• Home Movies, by Ray Robertson

And of course there will be many more, both Canadian and not. There may even be some non-fiction in there, we'll have to see. I'd like to say that I'd also like to get back into making more posts about critical theory, but I've made such promises in the past, and they bore no fruit. Better to say that they may happen, or they may not. I will be making some changes to the infrastructure and such, though, and hopefully as soon as next week. I'd like to add a search function (there used to be one, but it sucked and kept breaking, so I took it down), and I'd like to add a way to page backwards through the archives in a more reasonable fashion than just selecting a category and getting every entry on a single page. I'm sure it can be done fairly easily, but I just haven't tried to wrap my head around it yet.

So best wishes for the new year to all of you, and thanks for reading.

I read The Temptations of Big Bear several years ago as part of a course on contemporary Canadian literature. I was struck by Wiebe's formal experimentation and his deft, original approach at dealing with aspects of Canada's history that can be uncomfortable for many contemporary Canadians to acknowledge. It was a delicate, graceful book, and I'd squeeze the word "accomplished" in there somewhere if I could figure out how. So I was definitely looking forward to his 1974 follow-up book of short stories, Where is the Voice Coming From?. Turns out it was pretty terrible. Wiebe does not excel at the short story form at all. There are a few piece like "Scrapbook" and "Tudor King" that read like they were intended to be poignant coming of age tales about children dealing with the harsh realities of mortality in the prairies, but instead they are empty, amateurish scraps of narrative that confuse being sombre with being serious. "Millstone for the Sun's Day" looks like it could be a utopian/dysptopian science fiction thing, like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", but it just flat out doesn't make sense. Wiebe uses so many fictional titles and euphemism that the result is just kind of a vague sense of some kid doing something on a boat and some old man being displeased about it. "Did Jesus Ever Laugh?" falls into nearly every serial killer or insanity stereotype in all of literature (with the exception of the killer not being gay), and was boring to boot. In fact, of all thirteen of these stories, only and handful were worth reading at all, and only the title story actually stands out as memorable. And that's mostly just because it's a short version of the kind of thing he did in Big Bear.

Where is the Voice Coming From? was my third book for The Canadian Book Challenge, and my final book of 2007. I will begin my Reading 2008 project with Steve Zipp's novel, Yellowknife.

I met Leon Rooke briefly in 2001 at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, the same day I met Sheila Heti and George Elliott Clarke. I heard him read some stories, at least one of which hadn't been published yet. He didn't need a microphone; his voice wasn't just loud, it was big. You could hear it through the entire festival grounds. You could feel it. I told him that I had never read any of his books, but that after that performance I would go and buy the next one I found. And I did, in fact I bought two (Shakespeare's Dog, and Painting the Dog). Fat Woman is my third, and I didn't realize until I was nearly finished it that it was his first novel.

My edition isn't the one you see pictured here. Mine is a tacky blue mass-market paperback from a company called General Publishing, part of their New Press Canadian Classics line. On the cover is a not-very-good oil painting by a woman named Jane Martin. It's the sort of painting that would have been popular in Canada in the 1970s, but has not held up, and now looks only like the sort of thing that would have been popular in Canada in the 1970s.

I can't quite place the time in which the novel is supposed to be set, nor the location. The dialogue has an American south ring to it, but with the exception of some of the navy references, most of the cultural landmarks mentioned seem to be Canadian. The novel was first published in 1980, and though I've met people like those described in this novel, I still can't fathom that such deep, such profound ignorance could still exist at such a time in a nation such as this. And yet still I believe it. Fat Woman is a good book, not just because of Rooke's contagious prose style, hitting you like an old-school revivalist preacher, sucking you in and not ever letting go, but because there is a tremendous tension between an honest and sometimes harsh portrait of an uneducated rural woman and an overblown caricature of the same. There were times, reading this book, when my heart went out to Ella Mae Hopkins, for all that she had suffered growing up and at the hands of those around her who, despite their love (and here I'm thinking mostly of her dead mother and her husband) can't help but be cruel. Ella Mae suffers from wild mood swings, anxiety, and an over-eating disorder of epic proportions. It's easy to laugh at her, and sometimes I did. But I also pitied her, and despite her ignorance and her own portion of hate and bigotry, I felt myself sympathizing with her, and hoping that things would work out alright in the end. Rooke never really tells us for sure; it all comes down to whether or not we trust Edward Hopkins.

Fat Woman was my second contribution to The Canadian Book Challenge. Next: Where is the Voice Coming From?, by Rudy Wiebe. This will most likely be my last book of the year, depending on how much free time I find myself over the holiday season, so stay tuned for an end-of-year wrap-up and a preview of what books to expect in the new year. Happy holidays, everyone.

My first experience with Canadian literature was with a Carol Shields novel. I was in the seventh or eighth grade, I can't exactly remember which, and I had just gotten into the habit of listening to talk radio on the CBC before going to bed (don't ask; I was a strange child), and the program that aired just as I was nodding off was one in which selections from a Canadian novel were read every night over the course of several days or weeks. That novel was The Stone Diaries. My parents bought me a copy on our next trip to "the city" (Winnipeg), and I was off. To this day it remains tied for the much coveted title of "Favourite Novel" (the other contender is A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale). Despite becoming enamoured with her work at such an early age, The Republic of Love is only the third novel of hers that I have read. Why? Quite simply, because of Larry's Party. That book was a catastrophic failure, so far as I was concerned. Larry was not a man in any sense that I recognized, nor was he a woman in a man's body; I simply could not believe in the character at all, and it was a struggle to finish the book. I consoled myself with short story collections like Various Miracles and Dressing Up for the Carnival, but I was put off her novels for quite a few years. All this has now changed.

I fell in love with this book. The book's two protagonists, Fay McLeod and Tom Avery are damaged but real, well-drawn people with full lives, lives that feel like they could be biography rather than fiction. The main action of the book, and the main pleasure, is to watch these two characters move in a spiral around one another, sharing friends and places, existing on the periphery of each other's lives but never quite meeting, and never quite knowing why they fail to connect with the various lovers or almost-lovers that come and go. Destiny seems to have a hand in their eventual (inevitable) romance, but there is so much else going on, such a richness of detail to how their lives are presented, that it never rings false, never feels cheap or out-dated. The Republic of Love is an exquisite, satisfying book about real people finding real love, and living, more or less, happily ever after, and Shields somehow manages it without being sentimental or saccharine.

That's not to say that the book is perfect, of course. There are little things about it, not really relevant to the plot, where it's plain that Shields had no real experience. Things like fast food. Tom Avery eats on a pretty regular basis at his local A&W (a pretty appropriate choice, given the Winnipeg setting), but it's obvious that Shields hadn't set foot in one in more than a decade, if she ever had. The menu items he orders, which would have been popular when she was young had been discontinued for decades at the time the novel is set, she populates the restaurant with waitresses as well as cashiers and cooks, and the patrons tip regularly. None of this is accurate for any fast food franchise, never mind A&W specifically. It's a small mistake, but one that could have been avoided by eating a single meal for research, though I think I only found it jarring because I worked there for several years as a teenager. There were a few other similar things, mostly characters using slang terms and customs that belong to the generation before them, but they are of small consequence.

The Republic of Love was my first book as part of The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up: Fat Woman, by Leon Rooke.

I'm trying to remember if this is my fifteenth or sixteenth Navokov, but at any rate, it's the weakest, although that on its own doesn't say much. The weakest Nabokov is still stronger than the best work many other authors produce. Invitation to a Beheading was translated from the Russian (and quite ably, I must say) by Dmitri Nabokov, the author's son. It reads very much like Nabokov's later English-language novels.

Invitation to a Beheading follows Cincinnatus C. as he spends three weeks on death row at a dream-like prison in an equally dream-like country. His crime is "gnostical turpitude," a concept that is never fully explained, but based on the little information made available in the novel, has something to do with his being "opaque" at the level of his soul. What this actually means, I have no idea, but it frightens the other characters in the novel, who all live their lives based on a kind of dream logic that Cincinnatus can't seem to participate in with any success. It's actually that inability to mesh entirely with the dreamworld that saves him from his decided fate.

Much of the action of the novel, if you can really call it that (Nabokov's novels aren't really about "action" in the sense of events of consequence moving the plot forward), involves Cincinnatus, his jailer Rodion, fellow prisoner M'sieur Pierre (who also happens to be the executioner) and a few others whiling away the hours until the beheading, the exact date and time of which is kept hidden virtually until the moment itself. What Nabokov gives us is as much Alice in Wonderland as it is Kafka or Dostoyevsky, the dream-logic of the novel cheerfully thwarting any attempt at clarity or humanity, keeping Cincinnatus as off-balance as possible, he being the only conspicuously sane person in the novel.

I say this is Nabokov's weakest novel, or at least the weakest that I have read, because I think that he is at his best when his work is rooted firmly in the logic of things, and Invitation to a Beheading defies that, although the prose (even through Dmitri's translation) is brilliant, glittering stuff. This is a novel of strange juxtapositions and half-finished sentences, always skirting sense and clarity, but never quite hitting the mark. This is not a deficiency; it's obviously the whole point. I just don't think it's how Nabokov functions best. Either way, it was an incredibly satisfying read, as his books always are.

Next: The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields.

So two Bond novels in a row. I don't know if I'm spoiling myself, or setting myself up for a disappointment, because I'm now going to reach the end of my "guilty pleasure" series that much sooner. Ah well. Too late now, either way. I've been told by various folk that until the recent production of Casino Royale, this was the Bond novel that made it to film with the least radical changes, and that seems like it could still be a pretty fair assessment.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a slightly atypical Bond adventure, in the sense that he was genuinely undercover, right down to the fake name, and so there are a number of different challenges in this book; it's interesting to note that Bond may shy away from false identities simply because it is too difficult to play out convincingly, even with major preparation. The other atypical aspect of the book was of course the fact that Bond finally gets married (to a young woman named Tracy, daughter of the Capu of the Union Corse). Though much of the first third of the book is dedicated to Bond meeting and developing feelings for Tracy, the marriage still seems forced and rather rushed. I was not entirely convinced by it, and it's no surprise that she was killed in the last pages.

Alright, no more Bond for a while. Next up: Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov.

What has kept the Bond franchise from falling apart entirely, in terms of the films, are two things. First, the casting of Daniel Craig, who comes across as dangerous and slightly brutal, in addition to charismatic. Second, it is a return to the source material, and not just the content, but the spirit as well. Fleming's novels are simple, tough, and entertaining. What kept them fresh (what still keeps them fresh, for me at least) is the inclusion of new perspectives on the Bond character. Some previous books spent some time dealing with how Bond behaves at home, what it's like when he spends extended periods at the office, and how he prepares for and deals with a life of danger, rather than just, like the films, showing fast-paced glimpses of the danger itself. Such things keep him human. The Spy Who Loved Me offers yet another perspective, that of the "Bond girl". Viv Michel is a young Canadian woman who has returned to North America after spending a few years in Europe where she was used horribly by men she trusted. She is on a sort of pilgrimage, to find herself and to restore her confidence. She takes a short-term job to make a little money before heading further south, and accidentally stumbles into the middle of an insurance fraud scheme being perpetrated by some local gangsters. Bond doesn't even appear until the last third of the novel, and only then because he's had a flat tire nearby. The adventure is brief and strange, and has absolutely nothing to do with the nuclear submarine plot of the 1977 film of the same name.

The only real problem that I can see is that Fleming didn't seem to know a damn thing about how to write women (he may not have known a damned thing about women). The book is written from Viv's perspective, in her own voice, but she is basically just a collection early and mid-Twentieth Century stereotypes, and I think she would be sure to offend any modern female reader (and possibly any female reader at the time; certainly any who read the work of people like Iris Murdoch).

Next: On Her Majesty's Secret Service, by Ian Fleming (because there wasn't enough Bond in the previous Bond adventure to satisfy me).

It's strange, starting to read a novel by someone made famous for their visual skills. You hope, frankly, that they aren't downright illiterate, being published simply because they have a name rather than because they have any talent with words. Thank God that Chip Kidd can write.

Okay, so he makes some rookie mistakes. The pacing The Cheese Monkeys is way too fast, and the ending is a bit of a cop-out (I'm given to understand that this is partly based on his own experiences, but still, give us some closure). The only reason the book clocks in at 274 pages is because Kidd has given the text some insanely large margins (I must admit, the book is pretty cool to look at, fits comfortably in the hand, etc.; if nothing else, Kidd is an amazing designer). I would imagine that in word count it's barely more than a novella. But it's funny. Let's make that clear. The damned book is hilarious. I laughed out loud more times than I can count. The characters never quite become simple caricatures (at least the main ones don't), but it's a close call, because we also never really have enough time to get to know them properly, and in some ways the second half of the book seems like an excuse to get Kidd's ideas about graphic design down on paper. Not that they are bad ideas; they just aren't meaty enough to support an entire novel (the humour is, though; it's great).

I hope Kidd tries another novel, but something longer. I'd certainly read it.

And now: The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming.

This was a fun little book, and though it's actually wildly different, in many ways I was reminded of Christopher Moore's Lamb, my first book of the year. Robbins leans less towards the reverence than Moore, but also doesn't go quite as readily for the cheap laugh, either.

What we have in Jitterbug Perfume is an unfinished quest, three or four rather strange romances (all, in some way resolved with a certain level of satisfaction) and an unusual mediation on the relation between biochemistry and longevity. Oh yes, and beets. I feel better about eating beets, having read this. I can't really tell you that I was expecting this novel to be quite so grand (although it felt quite small), but after having seen the film adaptation of Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get The Blues it would have been wrong of me to go in with any real expectations at all. They would have been thoroughly confounded.

As is often the case for me with film and literature from the 1980s, I really only liked one or two characters (I don't know why it is, but I find that the 1980s had an incredible knack for justifying extreme selfishness, and believing that such a thing was somehow likable). Of course those two characters were Alobar, the more or less immortal man, and Priscilla the genius waitress, who showed more patience than I would have (or than a saint most likely would have) at the sexual-assault-level advances of her lesbian best friend.

There was a lot going on in this book, and I'd hate to spoil it for you, so I'll just say that I'm going to read some of his other books, probably next year, just to see if they live up to this one. Oh yes, also: eat your beets.

Next: The Cheese Monkeys, by Chip Kidd.

As I said earlier this year, every Philip K. Dick novel is like your first Philip K. Dick novel. And this one was no exception. The premise of the novel, "what would the world look like had Japan and the Nazis won WW2?" is a strange one to imagine from my vantage point this far from the war (my father, though older than average for fathers of twenty-eight year olds, is still not old enough to remember the war). The Allied victory seems inevitable, and we forget that there were times when it was very much in doubt. So how does it play out?

The Japanese of Dick's fictional late 1960s turn out to be very much like the Japanese of today (or rather, like our Western view of the Japanese people), and offer a reasonable, although not entirely likable to my eyes, way of living and dealing with the world. I found myself sympathizing with many of the conquering/colonizing Japanese characters far more than with most of the ignorant, bigoted American characters. At first I thought that Dick had painted a portrait of an America turned bitter and racist in defeat, and heavily influenced by many of the worst characteristics of the conquering fascists, but then I realized that if I were to look at the popular media from the time that Dick was actually pointing out that, even in victory he could see a great flaw in the popular American consciousness. Heavy stuff. I would not be surprised to learn that this book influenced William Gibson, actually. It felt very close to some of his work.

There's too much to say about this book, really. It's one of the best and most thought-provoking books I've read all year, and I was genuinely saddened that it ended. The title of the book refers to an author within the novel who has written an "alternate history" of the Second World War, one in which the Allies won (and two his credit, Dick changes some of the details so that it remains genuine fiction). The book has an interesting place in the novel, something that I think might deserve serious critical attention (if it hasn't already, I haven't looked), and I don't feel like I've thought about it long enough to give any real report on that place. My head nearly exploded when the source of book, or the author's ideas for the book, were revealed.

I can only finish by saying, read this book.

Next: Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins.