My Year In Books
The the top ten +
Some years ago, I started posting on Facebook a list of the favourite books I had read in the previous year —usually the top ten. Gradually I moved it from year’s end to November because I found some people liked to use it for their holiday shopping as well as their own reading.
Now that I have this Substack, I am going to share the post here.
This year, I had a particular problem. A number of friends have published books. I don’t think you would necessarily trust my reviews of friends’ books, nor should you. I almost invariably think they are excellent. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t! So this year, I will begin by describing a few of these wonderful books before turning to my top-ten list of books by people I don’t know.
Rooftop Garden by Menaka Raman-Wilms. This is an especial thrill for me. A debut novel by a former student, who is also a journalist at the Globe and Mail and host of their daily Decibel podcast. This is the story of an unusual friendship as well as an eco-thriller. It was long listed for the Giller Prize! Amazing achievement for a brilliant young woman.
Outsider by Brett Popplewell. Brett was a colleague of mine at the Carleton J-School and from the moment he joined the program, I could see that he was obsessed with this story, which has taken many years to research and write. It is the biography of a frankly very strange man, Dag Aabye. Born in Norway during the war, he becomes a practitioner of extreme sports and ends up in old age living in a bus on a mountainside in British Columbia, relentlessly running through snowstorms and heatwaves. A fascinating tale.
Paper Trails by Roy MacGregor. Words must extrude from Roy’s pores, or at least explode from his finger tips. While holding down full-time jobs as a journalist at Maclean’s, The Ottawa Citizen, The National Post and The Globe and Mail among other places, he’s written more than 70 books (not to mention the occasional screenplay). This is his own story from a rough-and-tumble start near Algonquin Park through many adventures in journalism.
The Taste of Longing by Suzanne Evans. I should have mentioned this book by my friend Suzanne a couple of years ago but I hadn’t read it yet! This is another incredible true story. Ethel Mulvany was brutally interned in Singapore by the Japanese during WWII. Strangely, she and her fellow inmates pass the time and sublimate their hunger through make-believe which includes composing decadent recipes which are contained in the book. A strange and marvellous story.
Please support my friends and buy!
And now, the list of books by non-friends who, to their credit, continue to be prolific as well.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. This was the best book I read this year, no doubt. It loosely follows the plot of David Copperfield, of which its title is an echo, of course. It is set amidst the opioid crisis in Appalachia and follows a boy as he struggles to adulthood in the face if the overwhelming odds life presents him. A deeply moving book filled with heroism and failure as well as fascinating characters and insight into an overlooked, sometimes despised and usually misunderstood slice of America. A Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction.
King, A Life by Jonathan Eig. This is a big thick biography of Martin Luther King but it is so elegantly and fluidly written that it avoids the density of, say, Taylor Branch’s famous trilogy of books on the Civil Rights movement. It is a very easy read. Eig doesn't tarry over uninteresting detail in the quest for completeness as Branch’s books did. Instead Eig takes us to the most moving or revealing stories. He is unafraid to address King’s frailties but in doing so he renders him as a human being instead of a saint. The book is striking for its elevation of the women in King’s life: not just Coretta Scott King but also the women with whom he strayed or with whom he worked who are excavated from the shadows of this frankly sexist milieu. The book also adds great nuance to his relationship with Malcolm X and new detail to the FBI’s relentless surveillance and pressure against him.
Trust by Hernan Diaz. This book was also selected for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. It is an examination of disaster capitalism through interwoven narratives of a New York mogul who thrives through the 1929 crash. The book features a series of stories written in different styles from different perspectives which gradually enable us to form our own perspective on this tale of love, money and power. A virtuoso piece of writing.
The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich. This is not a new book, but Erdrich is a new writer to me. Set in my native North Dakota on a Ojibwa reservation in the 1980s, it tells the story of a boy who sets out to investigate and avenge the rape of his mother. Despite its difficult theme, it takes us engagingly into a different world, filled with interesting characters who resist stereotypes. It was a National Book Award winner—and as I write this suddenly I realize that my favourite novels this year were all American, which is unusual for me.
Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm. One of the most interesting long-form journalists in America in the latter half of the twentieth century, Malcolm was an extreme skeptic of narratives, including journalistic ones. She never wrote an autobiography, but this comes close. This is a series of linked essays each taking a grainy black-and-white family photo as its text. Her prose, on occasion, will take your breath away. She says of her refugee family, for example: “We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray.”
The Wager by David Grann. Grann is rightly being celebrated right now for his 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon, which is now a Martin Scorsese movie. But it was on my booklist back then! The Wager is the true story of an eighteenth century British naval expedition intended to raid the Spanish for gold but which ends up in a shipwreck and mutiny off the desolate south coast of Chile. Rival parties journey back to England through almost unbelievable rigours to plead their cases with the admiralty, the justice system and the public. By the way, The Wager is Scorsese’s next film, also starring Leonardo di Caprio.
Fortune’s Bazaar, The Making of Hong Kong by Vaudrine England. The title of this book is a little misleading in that it is overly broad. It is specifically the story of mixed-race and mixed-culture Hong Kong people who, England argues, are in a sense the truest Hong Kongers. By virtue of their parentage, they have nowhere else to plant their lives; they are truly creatures of the place. The book deliberately complicates the British and the Chinese narratives about Hong Kong and more subtly undermines those who employ sweeping generalizations about colonialism to elucidate specific times and places.
The Last Viking by Don Holloway. OK, this is admittedly a little niche. It is the biography of Harald Hardrada, who I knew only from school days as the Viking chief who was defeated at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 by King Harold Godwinson, who was in turn defeated a matter of days later by William the Conquerer, ushering in Norman England. But Hardrada turns out to be more than a historical walk-on. Forced into exile at the age of 15 after an unsuccessful battle in Norway, he travels all the way to Constantinople where he rises to become the head of the Varangian Guard, leads naval battles across the Mediterranean and perhaps even fights in the Holy Land. He ends up bedding an empress, which you know isn’t going to end well, escapes imprisonment with his Viking crew, and ends up as king back in Norway, battling for the throne of Denmark before going after England. So, a bit of a rogue. Incredible tale, vividly told.
Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin. The story of the Oklahoma City bombers, told in part using what should be confidential defence attorney documents that weirdly end up in Toobin’s hands. A superb teller of legal stories, Toobin does not hesitate to make the links from Oklahoma City to the January 6, 2021 assault on American democracy. It turns out Merrick Garland is a pivotal figure in both.
Nine Quarters of Jerusalem by Matthew Teller. Again a bit niche, perhaps. But fascinating if you are, like me, fascinated by Old Jerusalem. The conceit of the book is that the four quarters into which the walled city of Jerusalem is conventionally divided—Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian—distort the complexity of the place, which houses communities of Syriac Christians, Sufi mystics and Dom Gypsies among many others. A reminder that you can never say something about this part of the world that is both simple and true.
I haven’t read any of your recommendations yet, but I can comment on the King biography. My wife Katya, who is reading your copy, was exhausted two mornings ago. She was up all night reading the bio. She was expecting it to be work, but she couldn’t stop turning the pages.
Interesting. He’s a a terrific writer. I just read his biography of Muhammad Ali, which an equally heavy tome and an equally breezy read, though I didn’t find the subject as compelling.