Happy New Year: looking back
Just before 2006 gave out its last gasp, a number of book commentators took a look back at a year in books that was, if not quite horribilis, at least a little disappointingis.
Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman came up with his own list of “literary losers” of the year. The not-much-missed Judith Regan ranks high for the O.J. fiasco, as does our own Alberto Manguel for the year’s “most pretentious comment.” Manguel’s crime was picking, as his favourite book of the year, “a 50-page-long essay by the Hungarian scholar László Földényi, Dosztojevszkij Szibérában Hegelt Olvassa, és sírva fakad (Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and weeps).” Kelly notes that “although he confesses to having no Hungarian, Manguel chose to reproduce the title in that language.”
In the Toronto Star, resident critic Philip Marchand runs through some of the more noteworthy book moments of the year — the James Frey scandal, the deaths of Irving Layton and Mickey Spillane, the use of a wildly inappropriate metaphor in Michael Redhill’s latest novel — and tries to suss out what they mean to the larger culture. (Marchand gets more than halfway through the piece before mentioning his onetime biographical subject Marshall McLuhan, which is actually pretty good for him.) He also has a piece on the “critical shots of the year” that is well worth reading.
And finally, The Globe and Mail asked a number of writers and celebrities for their favourite reads of the year. Many of the choices are predictable — lots of non-fiction about looming ecological disasters — but one notable pick comes from Vincent Lam, whose Bloodletting won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 2006. Lam picks Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, which had been the odds-on favourite to win the prize. Perhaps this kind of gracious, peacemaking gesture will set the tone for the coming year. And if not, well, graciousness and peace are boring, anyway.
Related links:
The Scotsman’s literary losers of 2006
Read Philip Marchand on the year in books
Read Marchand on the year in literary criticism
Read the favourites in The Globe and Mail
