Congrats to all the writers who made the list. I’ve found several books to add to my “to read” list! Can we extend summer so I can have a few weeks off just to read in the sun?

Here is the full list of nominees for Best English Book:
Food & Trembling, Jonah Campbell
You Are A Cat!, Sherwin Tija
echoic mimic, Lesley Trites
Fear Itself, Matthew Brown
The North Yorker, Alain Mercieca
Unspent Love, Shannon Gerard

A few pages in to Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, I started highlighting quote-worthy passages (that’s one thing I like about eBooks – you can highlight without feeling guilty about defacing a page). I finished by highlighting a quarter of the book.

I went through a Jeanette Winterson phase ten years or more ago. So it had been a while, and I was happy to return to her spare prose, her short (many even one-line) paragraphs. Her style is so readable, with such an easy rhythm to it, and maybe this makes the disturbing subject matter  easier to read.

She takes us through her very difficult early years, revisiting some of the material that appeared in her semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Considering her adoptive mother’s reaction to that novel, she touches on the nature of truth in writing: “I told my version – faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time.” Because, as she writes, “Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.”

It seems that, for her, writing is a way to try to make sense of and gain some measure of control on the messiness of life, while still leaving space for interpretation:

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

The first half of the books feels rather chaotic in structure, and you may start wondering where she’s going with all this. This is part of her style, as she explains “Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me.” The focus shifts and tightens with the second half of the book. She skips twenty-five years, and dives into an honest account of a very dark period in her life, describing her depression and suicide attempt. She recovers, and begins the search for her birth mother that carries us through the rest of the book.

Literature is what gets her through all these difficult times. When her mother burned her books, she started memorizing lines of poetry. She says that “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

Her conclusions certainly aren’t always entirely uplifting, but they are honest:

Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy – which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.

If the sun is shining, stand in it – yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes.

The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is lifelong, and it is not goal-centred.

What you are pursuing is meaning – a meaningful life. There’s the hap – the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn’t fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use – that’s going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.

It was a very emotional read. And I will end here before I quote half the book…

I work like a pack mule, but it’s my own choice. I’m like a galley slave who’s chained for life to his oar but who loves the oar. Everything about it . . . I go over each sentence, time and again. I start by cutting all the words it can do without. You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out—repetitions, synonyms, things that simply don’t mean anything. . . . I go over every image, metaphor, comparison, to see if they are fresh and accurate. If you can’t find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. Let the noun stand by itself. A comparison must be as accurate as a slide rule, and as natural as the smell of fennel. . . . I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. . . . Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless. . . . A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun. . . . Line is as important in prose as in an engraving. It has to be clear and hard. . . . But the most important thing of all . . . is not to kill the story by working on it. Or else all your labor has been in vain. It’s like walking a tight-rope. Well, there it is. . . . We ought all to take an oath not to mess up our job.

Now to apply this advice to the editing of my latest chapter…

Katrina Barton Best, Bird Eat Bird
Katrina Barton Best is a wickedly funny and skilled writer. These stories are so entertaining that I read the entire book in a day, in a huge gulp, barely leaving the couch. The characters are quirky, and their conflicts are unusual. With this debut collection of stories, Katrina won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean. She grew up in the UK but now lives in Montreal, so I even have the pleasure of seeing her around at readings once in a while. I would say she’s definitely one of Montreal’s top writers to watch.

Lynn Coady, The Antagonist
This main character of this novel, Rank, had one of the most original and entertaining voices I’ve read in a long time. Though I’ve seen it classified as a “hockey novel,” it really had very little to do with hockey. Rank tells his life story by way of e-mails to an old college friend. This is the first book I’ve read by Canadian Lynn Coady, and now I want to go read everything she’s written.

Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
One of Joan Didion’s early novels, this is an old classic that I finally got around to reading. And I was very happy I did, despite it not being the most, err, uplifting of books. Though it was published in 1970, the writing still feels innovative. I’m more familiar with Didion’s non-fiction writing (Blue Nights is at the top of my “To Read” list for 2012), and now I’d like to delve into more of her fiction.

Emma Donoghue, Room
This book was much-hyped after its release in 2010. I wasn’t sure if it could live up to the hype, but it drew me into a unique, imaginary world in a way that no book has in a long time. The majority of the narrative takes place in a single room, and is told through the voice of five-year-old Jack. A real page-turner.

Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues
This novel won this year’s Giller Prize, and I have to say that I was rooting for Esi Edugyan after reading it. Half-Blood Blues tells the story of an ageing jazz musician in Baltimore, going back in time to revisit him and his band-mates as they move through Berlin and Paris at the beginning of the Second World War. It offers a unique perspective on being black in Nazi Germany. Beautiful writing.

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Winner of the Pulitzer prize for fiction, this was another much-hyped book that surprisingly lived up to my expectations (perhaps in part because I read it before at least some of the hype – I did start to tire of all the Jennifer Egan coverage at a certain point). It tells the story of a rock music executive, his assistant, and the people surrounding them. Notable for its innovative narrative structure, and for being the first book I’ve read with an entire chapter written in PowerPoint. I thought the PowerPoint chapter would feel overly gimmicky, but it actually worked really well and was fun rather than showy or tiring. A highly entertaining read.

Stephen Elliott, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir
In this unusual memoir that is really only part memoir, Stephen Elliott (founding editor of The Rumpus) relates his fascination with a murder case, and his involvement with the case’s suspects. This storyline is interwoven with tales of his writer’s block, adderall addiction, relationship with his father, search for self, and much more. The result is complicated and compelling.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides is another writer who has been in the media a lot lately (I’ve lost track of the number of interviews with him I’ve read in the past few months). On the surface, The Marriage Plot is a more straightforward book that his last, the sprawling Middlesex. I couldn’t help but identify with the protagonist, Madeleine, a Victorian novel-loving English major whose life is shaken up when she takes Semiotics 101 and is introduced to deconstructionist theory, as well as the charismatic Leonard. The narrative follows three main characters through college and the scary years beyond it. In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Eugenides explains that the progression of his work has gone “from sentence, to plot, to character.” I can see how that plays out in his three novels, with The Marriage Plot being, as he puts it, “a highly character-driven book.” And that’s why I couldn’t put this book down: I got hooked on the characters, and wanted to know what would happen to them.

Darcie Friesen Hossack, Mennonites Don’t Dance
This debut collection of short stories likely introduced some urban-dwelling Canadians to a world they were mostly (perhaps unless they’d read some Miriam Toews) unfamiliar with: the small towns and Mennonite traditions of the Canadian prairies. At least, that’s what it did for me. And it painted this world so beautifully and brilliantly, earning Darcie Friesen Hossack a spot on the shortlist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean. Another young Canadian writer to watch – I look forward to her next book.

Michael Winter, The Architects Are Here
I have a special place in my heart for a certain group of novels coming out of Newfoundland (which may have at least something to do with me being an Atlantic Canadian), and Michael Winter is one of my favourite writers in this group. (Not to mention his sister, Kathleen Winter – if I had made a top 10 list for 2010, Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel would have been very high up on the list. I was kind of torn apart by the beauty of that book.) The Architects Are Here was published in 2007, and picks up the narrative thread of Winter’s 2002 novel This All Happened (another one I loved), with the return of protagonist Gabriel English. It follows the complicated relationships between Gabe, his friend David, and his sometimes-girlfriend Nell in a story that’s funny and tragic at the same time.

Readings from the Snare Books and Coach House Kingston Megalaunch will air on Friday, November 10 at 4PM on CFRC 101.9 FM’s “Finding A Voice.”

Hear Georgia Webber, Leigh Kotsilidis, Tristan Hughes, Jenny Sampirisi, Pearl Pirie, Sherry Huang, Faith M Mousa, and me!

The show will also air live and be archived online at cfrc.ca.

Queen University’s The Journal wrote about the event (and echoic mimic!) here.