Aggregate list of best books

Yesterday, I wrote about overlooked books in the top lists of 2012. I also mentioned the usual suspects that seemed to be on everyone's list. Flavorwire took that one step further, actually documenting the books that appeared in several top lists of 2012. The lists they chose are as follows:

Publisher’s Weekly
Slate
TIME (Fiction)
TIME (Nonfiction)
Vogue
The Washington Post
Book Riot
Amazon
The Atlantic
Esquire
The Huffington Post
The New York Times
The Daily Beast
Newsday
Christian Science Monitor (Fiction)
Christian Science Monitor (Nonfiction)

This looks to be a fairly representative collection of American publications, spanning a wide range of reading interests, from commercial (Amazon) to industry (Publisher's Weekly), critical (New York Times, Washington Post) and general (Vogue, Esquire). It even polls a couple of blogs for good measure (Book Riot, The Daily Beast). The results aren't too surprising: Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies was the most listed book, appearing on 9 of 14 fiction lists. Other titles mentioned several times were Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (7), Gone Girl (6), This is How You Lose Her (5), and Arcadia (4). It looks like I agree so far with several of these choices, though I have yet to read Mantel. 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Canadian Literature

Last week I read an intense article about the state of Canadian Literature - CanLit - from Steph at Bella's Bookshelves. She was upset about a 2006 article by Douglas Coupland in The New York Times on CanLit. Coupland provides a broad and stereotyped view of Canadian Literature to his American audience, distinguishing "CanLit" from "Canadian writing" by explaining that CanLit is that which promotes the national identity from a time when we needed to separate ourselves from our American and British cousins, and it persists today.

Steph is surprised that an opinion like this exists in the 21st century, considering the wide range of talent coming from Canada recently. The acclaimed novels of the last ten or fifteen years are less than stereotypical and point toward a new identity of Canadian writing. However, Coupland also admits to this. He writes that it is disappointing that the many, many great writers of the new generation do not get the recognition they deserve or are categorized as "experimental": "CanLit is not a place for writers to experiment, and doesn’t claim to be that kind of place. CanLit is about representing a certain kind of allowed world in a specific kind of way, and most writers in Canada are O.K. with that — or are at least relieved to know the rules of the game from the outset and not have to waste time fostering illusions." Is it surprising that Coupland has this opinion? No: from his debut with Generation X, he has been outside of CanLit, and he also admits to this.

Steph's vehement post brings to our attention all of the great writing that has come out of Canada in the last ten years, and she is right: There has been some great writing to come out of Canada in the last ten years. But Coupland is not saying that there is not great writing, just that the established literary community in Canada expects a different type of writing from Canadian writers, more in line with Atwood or Ondaatje. Steph makes a plea for changing this definition:

To be Canadian is to always be searching for meaning, place, purpose, in our own country, in the world. I think all humans do this. The details in our writing are not only what make us relate to each other, but what place us in time and sensibility. Ultimately, we write about the human experience, not just the Canadian one. But that Canadian experience, because of our origins and changing culture and constant questions of identity, and our observations of daily life (which Coupland details quite effectively in his own novels), as well as our ability to imagine outside our boundaries, defies being boxed by its very definition. So why must we insist on limiting it? Canadian writers are daily redefining CanLit. If we’re paying attention, there’s no way we could think like Coupland.

I sympathize with Steph on this point, as it is nearly impossible to categorize Canadian writing into a neat container. Many authors write about experience outside of Canada, and in ways foreign to traditional writing, and will never fit into a description of CanLit. But all great Canadian writers share a fundamental acceptance of their place in the world: a separation from the parts around it, a realization that we are indeed different from other writers from other places. Authors may not always write about rural Canada, or regional stereotypes, but they are always Canadian.

CanLit may be changing with every Patrick deWitt or Zsuzsi Gartner that comes along, but it is a slow change, one that must take into account the 200+ years of writing that came before it. And while British and American writers may not be under pressure to write the great national novel, it will always be a presence in Canadian writing, for we are irrevocably changed by our environment, our country, our separateness, in ways that those authors aren't. Then again, Hilary Mantel just won the Man Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies, about a period of time quintessential to modern British identity. It may not be a Canadian thing, but a global necessity that writers write about what's around them.

Check out both articles to add your opinion about Canadian literature. As well, kudos to Steph for setting up the visual guide, with stacks and stacks of great Canadian books to illustrate her point. It made me eager to keep reading great Canadian writing. Speaking of which, time to get back to Tamas Dobozy.

2012 Man Booker Prize Announced

Today, Hilary Mantel was awarded the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her book Bring Up the Bodies, a sequel to the 2009 Booker-winning Wolf Hall. She was the favourite to win the award at 6/4 odds; it is "the third time in eight years that the favorite has won the award (Wolf Hall was one of the others)." The win marks two other milestones: "Not only does Hilary Mantel become the first British novelist and the first woman to win the prize twice, she is also the first writer to win double glory with a sequel."

This year's Booker contest sparked a debate about readability and popular fiction winning the award; the chair of the prize, Sir Peter Stothard, previously ruffled feathers with his stodgy opinion on bloggers and literary criticism, while simultaneously stating that the Man Booker should not be defined by "readability." It is interesting, then, that the prohibitive favourite and previous winner should win the award. For all its talk of challenging readers and selecting lasting titles, the Prize committee chooses the most obvious novel. The Guardian has a similar opinion:

"The other novels on the shortlist could never be so popular. Deborah Levy's Freudian tale of madness among the middle classes, Jeet Thayil's brilliantly rambling stories of druggy Bombay, Tan Twan Eng's exploration of atrocity and artistry, Alison Moore's slow-burning portrait of a man in flight from his past: Mantel's is, literally and metaphorically, a weightier book than these. 

"But Mantel's real challenger on the shortlist, and the novel that has missed out to her double coronation, must have been Will Self's Umbrella. An undeniably daunting slab of high modernist prose, without such concessions as speech marks or paragraph breaks, it's also a brilliantly absorbing and audacious meditation on madness, consciousness, technology, war and the mess of the 20th century.

"As a highbrow panel dropped the previous year's demands for "readability" in favour of complexity and the sheer pleasures of innovative prose, it looked for a while as though it could have been Self's year. As it is, perhaps Umbrella would have been too radical a choice for a prize that, as the country's biggest, cannot help but be a little conservative."

For another year, the Booker Prize offers lively debate about literature, literary critics, and readers. Whether you agree with the selection or not, you can't argue about keeping great literature in the spotlight. Now the watch begins for next year!