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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

It is not at all unusual for commuters in Toronto to be driven to tears on the city’s eternally gridlocked roadways. So nobody would have thought it particularly unusual to see a driver, locked in the crawl along the Gardiner Expressway, weeping and grabbing for more Kleenex as she inched along in the pre-dawn traffic.

It was not congestion that brought me there, however, but the remarkable memoir When Breath Becomes Air, by Dr. Paul Kalanithi.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time in my car, commuting to and from work. What has saved me, time and again, are audiobooks, and their engine, the OverDrive app, which allows me to download any book from the library and begin listening. I have always been a bit free-range as a reader, but when someone’s reading to you in the privacy of your own car, you are a willing captive for any number of stories.

What I value most on the journey is to be transported, and the book that carried me furthest along, and whose words stay with me still, is Kalanithi’s.

For a memoir on death, it is remarkably and unrelentingly lifeaffirming. The writing — from this polymath who came to neurosurgery by way of English literature and human biology — is spare and profound, never resorting to treacle or self-pity.

As he navigates his way towards his own death, Kalanithi leaves us with a lasting meditation on how we should live. — Anne-Marie Owens is editor-inchief of the National Post

MY STRUGGLE

Writerly brilliance makes for deeply satisfying reading. But greatness is something else, arousing awe. When the author is not only alive, but at the full height of his power, add a kind of nervous excitement at witnessing literary history before the ink is quite dry: that was my feeling encountering Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard last summer. Knausgaard is a supernova, peer to Tolstoy, Mann, Cervantes and Joyce.

His subject is his own, often uneventful bourgeois life. Controversially, Knausgaard’s six-volume chef d’oeuvre is entitled, like Hitler’s autobiography, My Struggle. Even more controversially, from his family’s perspective, is that his novels are not only based in fact, they are factual, right down to the actual names of family, friends and colleagues. Sounds boring, but the parts add up to more than the whole.

On good advice, I began with Volume 2, when, living in Stockholm with his second wife, he chronicles his struggle to juggle the demands of writing with the claims of domestic intimacy. Knausgaard’s prose is deceptively simple. And his candour is unfiltered, pure: he loves his family, “But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me.” You won’t know why you can’t put his novels down. But you won’t. — Barbara Kay is a National Post columnist.

SURPRISED BY HOPE

When Zaphod Beeblebrox tries to engage Marvin the Paranoid Android’s non-existent enthusiasm by offering “a whole new life stretching out in front of you,” Marvin groans “not another one.” Oh yes indeed, retorts N.T. Wright in his 2008 Surprised by Hope, the best book I read this year.

The title tribute to C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy heralds a joyful, hopeful work of theology entirely appropriate to the Christmas season. For it addresses the crucial question of what sort of afterlife Christianity promises, a topic on which Wright suggests most Christians are at least as confused as non-Christians.

With lively wit and deep erudition he dispels insipid visions of sitting around a boring misty heaven languidly strumming harps. He demonstrates that the Bible and Christian tradition instead make the astonishingly weird offer of actual resurrection, a return to bodily life without our current physical or moral imperfections, in a regenerated physical world, a new Jerusalem.

Implausible? Of course, like Christianity generally. But has anyone got a better, or more convincing, account of why we’re here, why we’re bound by moral laws and where we hope we’re going? So everyone should understand this vision before judging it, favourably or otherwise. — John Robson is a National Post columnist.

SS-GB

As 2016’s bizarre political campaigns unfolded and public fears of the “altright” surged, I found myself thinking of a book that got away. I had set out to read Len Deighton’s 1978 murder mystery SS-GB over a decade ago but somehow never got to it. Until this year.

It’s a novel of alternate history — a period piece set in a world where things turned out differently than ours. Unlike most such works, the story isn’t focused on exploring and explaining that difference (those familiar with Robert Harris’s excellent Fatherland will find SS-GB familiar). No, in SS-GB, Britain’s invasion and partial occupation (fighting continues in the north) by Nazi Germany in 1941 is presented as established fact, but never explained, beyond occasional references to battles fought and lost after the fall of France. Our protagonist, a detective with a Scotland Yard operating under the control of the SS, investigates a murder that puts him in constant danger from British collaborators, the loyalist resistance, nominally neutral American spies and violently opposed elements of Germany’s intelligence services and military.

It’s an engaging read, and a chilling one. Deighton’s easy depiction of how readily a once-free people adapted themselves to fascist rule, in a country remembered today for its proud resistance, is distressingly (if imperfectly) in tune with the tenor of our time. — Matt Gurney is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s AM 640 and a former editor of the National Post Comment section.

A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY

Recommended by a friend as the greatest book he’s ever read, 1992’s A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel is an engrossing, extremely detailed and historical look at the “rough and tumbril” — thanks Britain’s Independent — of the French Revolution seen through the eyes of four men who lived during it. The background facts are true but Mantel recreates a world in which the men lived and then invents conversations they must surely have had. I was so entertained that afterwards I went straight out and read The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert (1980) to make sure she’d got her facts straight. She had. Sometimes though, she tries to be too clever with words. Like the great dame who was “exercising her foible” — eating candle wax. Now, I understand what she meant. I know what a foible is. I realize it needs exercis- ing. But the mind rebels, even now I see the great dame exercising her gerbil. But that may just be me. — Michael Higgins is a senior news editor at the National Post.

REMEMBRANCE OF TIMES PAST

I’ve been reading Remembrance of Times Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) by Marcel Proust. I commend it for its incomparable style. Proust is a lexical and grammatical sybarite. His sentences, serpentine and everlasting, reward quite beyond the sometimes arduous training necessary to grasp their meaning, unmatched rhythms, and faultless diction. His mastery of word and phrase, and brilliance of metaphor, is, of modern writers, challenged only by Nabokov. Conveniently, Remembrance of Times Past is also the perfect, the Platonic, citation in support of Nabokov’s wonderful and true assertion that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Considering its daunting length (most novels are Smart cars, Remembrance is a prairie freighttrain) this may appear off-putting. However the view from the summit is worth the (early) weariness of the climb. Its other great merits are the wild comedy of its scenes, the parade of its characters and the narrator’s obsessively unspooling observations. Baron de Charlus, the priggish, grandiloquent, pure-blood “invert” is one of the master characters of all fiction. Another thing I’d add to its praise is Proust’s flair for gifted aphorism.

A final note. I can only read English, and the translation I have is C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s, Chatto & Windus (12 vol.). I have frequently faced the question of how magnificent the novel must be in its own and original French, if a translation of it (however gifted the translator, a second language version is ineluctably a reduction of the original’s power and beauty) can be, as Moncrieff’s undeniably is, a work of such summons and pleasure. — Rex Murphy is a National Post columnist.

SEVEN DAYS DEAD

Much as I would like to claim that 2016 was the year I finally read Infinite Jest or In Search of Lost Time, I continue to expend a great deal of time on mysteries and thrillers. Thanks to a television show I hosted called Mystery Ink (which wrapped in 2004 but continues to run autonomously in the night hours on unwatched networks) I may have read every procedural book written in Canada. I look forward to old friends like Louise Penny and Linwood Barclay, but I am like Stephen King’s Misery Chastain for John Farrow.

Farrow, the pen name of literary writer Trevor Ferguson, is the creator of the Storm series of books featuring Detective Emile CinqMars, a cerebral investigator with a deliberate questioning technique and a savant-worthy sensitivity for grand and petty human impulses. Seven Days Dead finds a retired Cinq-Mars on the island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy trying to calm his restive mind and rekindle his mature marriage. A series of deaths draws him into a maelstrom of island drama rooted in class, resentment, insularity and secrets. Farrow’s lean prose, his delicate understanding of his characters’ inner lives and his vivid depictions of the worst conjurings of Mother Nature make his all-too-short series of books one of the genre’s treasures. — John Moore is host of Moore in the Mornings on Toronto’s NewsTalk 1010.

THE STAND

I first read Stephen King’s magnum opus, The Stand, in my teens, launching into it during a reading period in Gr. 10 English as our teacher, a kind-hearted nun who disapproved of Mr. King, frowned mildly. This was the original version published in 1978, at a mere 823 pages. King’s manuscript had been closer to 1,200 pages, but his publisher, Doubleday, had balked. A decade later, King re-issued the book in something closer to its original form — at 1,153 pages. This paperback is the size of a brick. It should be classified as a weapon.

Thankfully, we now have audiobooks. That’s how I re-read The Stand in the spring of 2016 — all 47 hours and 52 minutes of the uncut version, in a solid narration by Grover Gardner, on Audible. com. I was pleased to find that it still holds up: this is, simply, the greatest tale of apocalypse and dystopia in modern popular fiction. Part road trip, part adventure, part morality play and part supernatural horror tale, this novel sets the standard for the many forays in the genre that would follow — including The Walking Dead, which phrase by the way appears early in The Stand. Main characters Stu Redmond, Fran Goldsmith, Harold Lauder, Larry Underwood, Nadine Cross, Mother Abigail and Randall Flagg are not merely archetypes through which King articulates his moral vision of America, though they are that. They’re also real people, whose travails in the wake of a world-ending super-flu kept me engaged for page, after page — after page. It is a great story, well told, until the very last line. — Michael Den Tandt is a National Post columnist.

THE STAND (YES, AGAIN)

I grabbed the best book I read all year upon my colleague Michael den Tandt’s recommendation. The above-mentioned nearly 1,200page version of Stephen King’s The Stand gobbled up an entire week at a cottage this past August, but it’s the kind of book that just kept kicking in my head. Den Tandt had framed its basic plot of a post-apocalyptic populace literally choosing between a Dark Man and a wise old lady as a perfect novel during the election season that would give us President-elect Donald Trump.

And it was indeed that. But in King’s hands that ages-old and often trite plot of the good vs. the bad nature of man became so much more. Perhaps the only flaw is the book is too male, despite the matriarch who would unite the white knights, the female characters often feel like accessories to

KAY: ‘OUT OF HER PAIN CAME THIS BOOK, ONE I WOULD RECOMMEND TO ANYONE’

the men’s quest for self-discovery. Despite that, it’s the kind of book that sucks you in and burrows into your brain. There’s love and horror and the inevitable politics of trying to organize people. But it’s also a book about how people can reinvent themselves, and that your place in life, even your persona, is never truly fixed. People are always redeemable, even in the darkest of times. And in the year of horror that was 2016, King’s dark and most acclaimed novel offered a glimmer of hope that, maybe, just maybe, humanity can still find the better angels of its nature amid all the muck and fear. — Ashley Csanady is a reporter for the National Post. Editor’s note: In the years we have been doing this feature, this is the first time the same book has been selected twice — how interesting that it is a novel that came out decades ago. We agree, however, that it remains an excellent read.

THE MAN WHO KNEW

Here’s one of the big money questions of 2016: Is the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 20,000 — triple its low following the 2008 financial crisis — a preventable bubble that could burst in the New Year? Another: if the Canadian housing market is a giant bubble that could shake the financial system, what should be done?

If you find these questions intriguing, pick up a copy of The Man Who Knew, the brilliant biography of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby. Few better books have been written about economics and the dynamic man-made business of setting policies that shape (or not) world economic development. As Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Greenspan presided over the central bank for five terms, through market crashes to the 2001 dot-com bubble. Many blame Greenspan’s laissez-faire thinking for setting the stage for the great U.S. financial/ housing bubble blowout of 2008.

Nothing in economic history is that simple, and nothing about Greenspan is simple. He’s a complex man filled with contradictions: laissez-faire ideologue, ladies man, Ayn Rand Objectivist, price stabilizer, data freak, central banker, gold bug, libertarian pragmatist, bailout backer, state interventionist, tax cutter — and gasoline tax hiker.

But the intriguing policy issue at the core of Mallaby’s biography is the bubble problem. Because inflation remained low, Greenspan kept interest rates low and saw no reason to take action to deflate markets even as there were signs of irrational exuberance. He believed that, so long as prices were stable, market corrections could be handled by market players and regulators.

Mallaby concludes, at the end of his economic and political policy page-turner (I mean it), that Greenspan “should have conducted monetary policy” so as to prick the financial bubbles as they emerged. On the other hand, Mallaby takes a Greenspanian pivot in the other direction with a quick shot at the current fashion of “macro-prudential” regulation as advocated by today’s rock star of central banking, Mark Carney. Such regulation would have central bankers, as “superman saviours,” identify market bubble risks in advance and prevent their development by “cooly commanding mighty banks to pull back.” As the Dow rattles records and Canadian housing prices stay high, what should central bankers do? If nothing else, The Man Who Knew helps all of us understand how much they (and we) don’t know. — Terence Corcoran is a National Post columnist.

WILD: FROM LOST TO FOUND ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

I may be a cliché, but Cheryl Strayed’s epic hiking tome Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was the one book I couldn’t stop talking about, referencing, thinking about and using to bore my husband with during deep, what-is-life, while-we’re-doing-the-dishes conversations. The fact that it was featured prominently in the Gilmore Girls reboot this year was a bonus. I am a few years late to it, but Strayed’s 2012 story resonated with me on a number of levels — losing a mother (I lost mine three years ago), embarking on a ridiculous trip with little knowledge or preparation (something I would do), feeling occasionally lost in the life you’ve built.

I appreciated Strayed’s unflinching honesty about her lack of preparation, drug use and her use of sex as a balm. I’ve never felt the urge to run away and hike the Pacific Coast Trail, but the beauty of this book is that it made me want to, husband and two kids be damned.

It’s funny, it’s warm, it’s sexy, it’s emotional and above all, it’s hopeful. Who couldn’t use a bit of that these days? It’s the kind of book that has me flipping pages so fast because I needed to know what’s next, only to finish and go back to figure out what I missed. In the end, it didn’t have me scrambling to buy hiking boots so much as gaining a new appre- ciation for the path I’m already on. — Nicole MacAdam is editor of the Financial Post.

THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB

A book I’ve been spending a lot of time with lately is Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987). It scooped up all the big non-fiction prizes in its year, but I am becoming convinced it is a book of an even higher calibre, capable of persisting over centuries. One might say it was on the Robert Caro level, to mention another author of Pulitzer-class doorstops that reward re-reading. But Rhodes’ writing almost makes Caro seem relentless and gauche. The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the story of how modern physics brought us to the doorstep of the Nuclear Age. It takes us from Rutherford discovering radioactive decay and imagining the neutron to the ruins of Hiroshima. Writing this story required Rhodes to handle all manner of narrative material, ranging from science exposition to blood-and-guts war stories to global history. It is all done with humbling expertise; every sentence is a gem. It is the story of how the life of the mind set the world on fire — somehow at once a celebration and a warning. — Colby Cosh is a National Post columnist.

NAPOLEON THE GREAT

As you can tell from the title of 2014’s Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts is a big fan of Napoleon Bonaparte. The reputation of the self-crowned Emperor of the French has had its ups and downs, he concedes. And while Roberts readily agrees that Bonaparte made serious mistakes — invading Russia and failing to get out before winter was a biggie — he argues that, whatever his failings, the vastness of his impact and staying power of his achievements renders him unquestionably one of the great figures of history.

Bonaparte’s life, as Roberts notes, has been so extensively picked over that a 15-page treatise exists on a single coffee break he took one day in 1804. What makes his story different is the source: 33,000 letters dictated by the man himself and recently gathered by the Fondation Napoleon. Their astonishing range, intelligence, insight and basic human elements (just what he saw in Josephine remains a mystery) depicts an individual of profound depth, sophistication and complexity, who could be sickened at the gore his endless campaigns produced yet curiously unmoved at his responsibility for so much loss of life.

One fact worth noting: the Russian campaign that began his downfall was launched in response to the Tsar’s failure to fully implement Bonaparte’s “continental” system, a protectionist economic regime that banned trade with Britain and was widely abused. It was an early example of the failure of anti-trade philosophies and the ultimate futility of protectionism. You listening, Donald Trump? — Kelly McParland is a National Post columnist.

INVISIBLE NORTH: THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS ON A TROUBLED RESERVE

As a magazine editor who receives review copies of newly published works, I see a fair number of books about First Nations. Many of these books dwell on big, ambitious themes — such as reconciliation, social justice, and colonization. Unfortunately, too few of these books contain fresh firsthand journalistic reporting about the actual lives of First Nations people living on reserves. Alexandra Shimo provides a laudable exception, with her 2016 Dundurn Press book, Invisible North: The Search For Answers On a Troubled Reserve.

Shimo spent months living in Kashechewan, the James Bay Cree community that made newspaper front pages in 2005, when 800 residents were evacuated due to concerns about drinking water contamination. Shimo’s book is, in large part, an investigative report: she shows that some members of the community cynically hyped water-quality concerns, in a bid to bring more resources and government attention to Kashechewan. But the book is also a diary of her time in this troubled community. And her descriptions of interactions with residents are brutally unsentimental.

We get none of the airbrushed, romantic descriptions of First Nations peoples that too often make their way into accounts written by well-meaning outsiders.In the end, it is clear that Shimo was traumatized by her time at Kashechewan. But out of her pain came this book, one that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in the plight of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. — Jonathan Kay is editorin-chief of The Walrus and a National Post columnist.

IN THE WOODS (DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD SERIES)

I drove about 15,000 kilometres across the United States this year, covering the presidential election, pipeline protests and other stories. I stayed sane listening to audiobooks, including Jo Walton’s outstanding “Small Change” series (an alternate history where Britain makes peace with the Nazis and slips into fascism) and Elizabeth Hand’s remarkable Cass Neary books — three dark mysteries each starring a burnt-out aging punk photographer.

But the best books I listened to this year were both from Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. French has been writing insular, first-person murder mysteries since 2007. Each one is centred around and written from the point of view of a different murder detective (or in one case, an undercover cop) in Ireland’s largest city. The books are masterworks of perspective.

You only really learn how unreliable each narrator is once you’re several books in.

The first book in the series, In the Woods, is, on the surface, about a dead girl and an older disappearance. But it spins out into so much more. It’s about memory and friendship and the lies we tell ourselves. For me, though, the most recent book is the most satisfying yet.

Released earlier this year, The Trespasser walks a paranoid line. Narrated by the only woman detective on the squad, it creates a profane spiral of half-truths and unimagined slights.

Read by the Irish actress Hilda Fay, the audio version is a pure, angry and always thrilling ride. It’s the perfect thing to listen to as you drive through the heartland, watching the world going mad. — Richard Warnica is a feature writer for the National Post.

THIRTEEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER

I’m as surprised as anyone that a book about Jimmy Carter negotiating is by far the most riveting history of the Middle East I have ever encountered. Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright, 2014’s Thirteen Days in September uses the 1979 Camp David Accords as a focal point to show the nationalistic and religious tensions that begat the modern Levant.

Interspersed with biblical references to draw eerie parallels with the ancient past, Wright’s book shows modern Israel through the eyes of a brilliant cast of characters. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the Trump of the era; a former Zionist terrorist leader seen as a reckless demagogue by Knesset opponents. Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president with an almost godlike self-image who seemed to know his actions would get him killed.

And finally, there’s Carter. Instead of a flaccid one-termer, Wright shows a deeply religious figure who saw it as his divine mission to secure Middle Eastern peace — even if it comes at the cost of his own re-election.

Throughout, there are scenes so cinematic it’s hard to believe they really happened: Begin surprising his hosts by reciting the entire Gettysburg address during a visit to the battlefield; Carter saving the negotiations at the 11th hour by presenting Begin with a gift to the prime minister’s grandchildren.

Dozens of books have been written about what Israel and its neighbours have done. But Wright, like no one before, shows the reader why. — Tristin Hopper is the Edmonton correspondent with the National Post.

What makes his story different is the source: 33,000 letters dictated by the man himself and recently gathered by the Fondation Napoleon. Their astonishing range, intelligence, insight and basic human elements … depicts an individual of profound depth, sophistication and complexity