Books of the Year 2010: Fiction and Poetry

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the Fiction and Poetry books that made the most impact in 2010.
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My year of writing a trendy book for the masses

If you were planning to write a My Year of Doing Something Singularly Weird or Stupid or Virtuous memoir, you better get those pitches in soon. The LA Times claims the trend is soon to be played out:

They’re not professional pranksters, exactly, but the authors of what might be called gimmick books — memoirs with premises so high-concept they could come from Hollywood pitch meetings: This year, I will take all of my instruction from self-help gurus. Or, this month, I will be radically honest with everyone I meet. Or, today I will try to behave exactly like George Washington, genteel bow, Dudley Do-Right walk and all.

The last few years have also seen many green-themed gimmick books, including Colin Beavan’s new No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. Gimmicky or not, some have been fabulously successful, and as it gets harder to break into print, the category remains one that publishers invest in.

The article goes on to explore the king of the gimmick genre, A.J. Jacobs. The title of his next book is The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment. He spent 2004 on a quest to become the smartest man, and 2007 taking the Bible literally.

Scott Timberg posits that these stunt books may be the result of the industry’s earlier slew of poor-me suckfest memoirs, the more harrowing the childhood the better. Timberg quotes industry observer Sara Nelson:

“Poor Frank McCourt wouldn’t get published today, I’d bet.” says Nelson, “The dreary Irish childhood recounted in Angela’s Ashes, from 1996, “was pretty horrific, but in an old-fashioned way. Readers have been desensitized to that.”

Those bloody, author-thievin’ Irish

In response to the recent spat between Ukrainians and Russians over the true citizenship of Nikolai Gogol, The Guardian books blogger John Mullan questions the whole notion of countries laying claims of ownership on writers. He also takes the opportunity to poke some fun at Ireland, for what he sees as its penchant for stealing authors away from Britain.

Look at the Irish, who have proved particularly skilful at this. They have effortlessly reclaimed all the great authors who fled the country of their birth – Goldsmith, Joyce, Beckett – even though the latter wrote some of his greatest work in French, the language of his adopted country. They have managed to persuade many that Laurence Sterne (born in Ireland because his father was a British soldier stationed there) and William Congreve (born in Yorkshire, but educated partly in Ireland because his father was another British officer) were really Irish. (The fact that both these writers were witty somehow confirms their essential Irishness.) And, their biggest triumph, they have taken possession of Jonathan Swift, perhaps the greatest of all satirists. In fact Swift called himself “English”, spoke of his residence in Dublin as an “exile” in “a land I hate”, and did not even have an Irish accent. But he has long become a great Irish patriot, adorning banknotes and tourist brochures.

James Reaney, 1926-2008

Ontario playwright James Reaney died last week at the age of 81. Reaney, who was a poet and a professor as well as a playwright, lived in London, Ontario, and Southwestern Ontario was the backdrop for much of his work. He is best known for his trilogy of plays about “the Black Donnellys,” a family of Irish immigrants in Lucan, Ontario (just outside London) who were massacred by a mob of their neighbours in 1880. The three Donnelly plays – Sticks and Stones, The St. Nicholas Hotel, and Handcuffs – were just reissued in a single volume by Dundurn Press.

A little continuity

Ryan Bigge wasted no time in demonstrating his disdain for Leah McLaren’s debut novel, The Continuity Girl, in his review for the Toronto Star on Sunday. After praising the typesetting as the novel’s only virtue, Bigge struggles for adjectives to describe the prose: “Uber-lousy? Fifth-rate? Super-bad? None of the above. There exists no English word that adequately describes the not-so-goodness herein.” Bigge then goes on to trash the novel and dismiss McLaren as a “provocative pool toy that is kept inflated only by the warm air of the chattering classes.”

What Bigge leaves out of his review is that McLaren trashed his debut book, a memoirish examination of the lives of single men called A Very Lonely Planet, in her column. In Other Media can’t remember McLaren’s exact wording, but we suspect that Bigge has been waiting for some time to even the score.

Related links:
Read Ryan Bigge’s article in the Toronto Star

Speculation begins over Lapham’s replacement at Harper’s

Last week, Lewis Lapham announced his decision to step down from his 24-year-long post as editor-in-chief of Harper’s, saying to The New York Times, “I have a certain number of years left and a number of things I’ve left undone.”

Creator of popular sections in the magazine that include the ever-imitated Harper’s Index — and largely responsible for the magazine’s current mix of essays, fiction, and snippets, as well as its left-leaning stance — Lapham’s presence at the helm of one of America’s oldest magazines will be missed.

But the fun part — speculation on successors — has only really begun, and Jim Hanas of the blog Encyclopedia Hanasiana conjectures that Harper’s and Saturday Night alum and This American Life senior editor Paul Tough is likely a candidate, as well as other Harper’s alums Jack Hitt and Michael Pollan. In response to Hanas’s call for “some irresponsible conjecture, dammit,” Bookslut’s Michael Schaub throws in a pick of his own: “Notre Dame head football coach Charlie Weis. He turned the Fighting Irish from also-rans to BCS contenders. Can he do the same for one of America’s most beloved magazines?”

Related links:
Click here for the official word from Harper’s
Click here for The New York Times‘ take on the news
Click here for Jim Hanas’s speculations on Encyclopedia Hanasiana
Click here for the posting by Bookslut’s Michael Schaub

Literary history as an excuse for drinking

With heritage locales dedicated to the likes of Joyce and Wilde and guided literature-themed tours brimming with more foreign visitors than ever finished Ulysses, the Irish tourism industry makes a mint from its literary heritage. In a recent article on the Book Standard website, Jessa Crispin gets inside the world of literary pub crawls in Ireland by — how else? — joining in on one.

Between lectures and explanations given by tour guides drinking as heavily as their charges, Crispin learns one thing: literary pub crawls are more about the pub than the literary. Making her rounds, Crispin talks to her fellow crawlers: people who joined on the recommendations of tourist information booth staffers. There are Americans who have yet to attempt a Joycean doorstop, a tour guide who provides an explanation for the extreme popularity of pub crawls — “[the fact that] Dublin is so boring” — and even a mother-son team. “I ask Londoner John what made him come down tonight. He points at a woman. ‘That’s my mom. She wanted to go on the musical pub crawl, but I didn’t think I would be able to take it. I suggested this as a compromise.’”

Related links:
Click here for Crispin’s piece on the Book Standard website

Banville beats Booker odds

Last night, in a ceremony in London’s Guildhall, Irish novelist John Banville beat seven-to-one odds and brought home his first Man Booker Prize for a melancholy study on old age, love, and grief, The Sea. The Guardian called the novel “one of the least commercial on the six-strong shortlist” that also included such literary superstars as Zadie Smith and the bookie-favoured Julian Barnes.

Critics are mixed in their assessment of the book. The Daily Telegraph‘s Lewis Jones calls Banville “the heir to Nabokov … with his fastidious wit and exquisite style,” while The Independent‘s literary editor, Boyd Tonkin, calls The Sea “an icy and over-controlled exercise in coterie aestheticism” and its victory “possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest.”

Related links:
Click here for an article by Boyd Tonkin of The Independent
Click here for a review of The Sea featured in the Daily Telegraph in June