Best books of 2012
It’s been a memorable year for our city’s Arts & Life scene, and it’s time to look back at the highlights, provided by Journal writers and our readers.
❚ Today: The best movies and books
❚ Saturday: The best CDs
❚ Monday: The best outings/ vacations
Here are the choices for the best reads in 2012, and some older selections enjoyed this year, by Journal writers, editors and our readers.
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.
An extraordinary read, romantic and smart, a mosaic that rolls its cast of characters through Italian locales, old Hollywood and new, Edinburgh, Seattle and Portland.
— Richard Helm
Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter
Part love story, part mystery, part travelogue, part social criticism, this book is lovely, funny and biting.
Walter weaves together disparate characters from a tiny village in coastal Italy with those from modern-day Hollywood, jumping back and forth through time without ever losing the reader, creating vivid scenes and subplots that come together seamlessly in the end.
Everyone I’ve recommended this book to – and there have been many – has loved it.
— Marta Gold ❚ 419 by Will Ferguson My favourite read of the year was Will Ferguson’s 419 – the story of a reclusive Calgary proof reader who sets out to avenge her father’s death. A retired school teacher, her father commits suicide after being conned by a Nigerian email bank scam. On one level, it’s a mystery, akin to John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. It’s also a thoughtful morality tale that explores the cost of greed, the symbiotic relationship between conman and victim, the nature of exploitation, and just how far we’re willing to go to defend those we love.
— Paula Simons
My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler
I don’t read enough books these days, but My Horizontal Life (2005), a collection of essays by Chelsea Handler, was given to me as a birthday gift, and it’s an easy, lighthearted read that really made me laugh — especially after all that serious Fifty Shades of Grey nonsense. A novel I’m still enjoying is The Secret Scripture (2008) by Sebastian Barry. It’s beautifully written.
— Caroline Gault ❚ 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami If you’re not up to the challenge of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s recent convoluted 900-plus-pages opus 1Q84, start with his early masterpiece, the surreal mystery A Wild Sheep Chase.
— Roger Levesque 11/22/63 by Stephen King As a science fiction, suspense and history enthusiast, it was a treat to get all three genres in 11/22/63 by Stephen King. It’s about an English teacher who goes back in time through a time portal — in the kitchen of the neighbourhood greasy spoon, no less — to save President John F. Kennedy from assassination. I was a little leery of the book’s heft and length, and of King’s reputation as the literary equivalent of fast food, but it turned out to be a great escape. There were time travel conundrums, glimpses of 1950s and ’60s life, the usual King spookiness and even a love story.
— Bill Mah ❚ The Antagonist by Lynn Coady.
This series of outraged emails fired off by hulking former hockey enforcer Gordon “Rank” Rankin to the onetime university friend who portrayed him as a nasty oddball in his new novel is moving, opinionated and laughout-loud funny.
While the epistolatory novel can be an easy way to string together incidents without creating a plot, Coady’s Giller Prize-shortlisted book contains richly layered characters who do the darndest things for the craziest reasons. By the end Rank has spewed out his anger at the tragic twists his life has taken and appears to be finding peace at last.
— Gordon Kent
Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer
Set in Cape Town, Thirteen Hours is a spine-tingling murder mystery thriller where Detective Inspector Bennie Griessel must solve two murders and save a young American girl being chased by killers all while tip-toeing through the minefield of South African racial politics. My new favourite mystery author, Meyer tells a page-turning story with fully-developed characters that are very rough around the edges.
— Mark Suits ❚ The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
On a moment of impulse, Harold Fry starts walking across England one morning. Totally unprepared and still in his yachting shoes (the tattered shoes become almost their own character in the book), The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce is a journey of self-awakening and discovery for the middle-aged.
As Harold walks and meets a variety of characters, painful memories from his past flash past.
There are moments of humour and grace, and he also starts to remember why he fell in love with his now-distant wife.
You can’t help but cheer for Harold to finish his unexpected journey.
— Barb Wilkinson
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
This is the harrowing story of young Japanese women who came to the United States in the early 20th century lured by photographs of prospective husbands.
Misled about nearly every aspect of their new lives — even the photos were mostly phoney — the women settle into a number of different labour and service jobs.
Otsuka tells the story in a first person plural voice with enchanting, poetic prose and leads the reader, inevitably, to the Japanese internment camps of the Second World War. It’s a tale of societal injustice, but the book’s focus is the incredible fortitude of these young women.
— Stuart Thomson ❚ Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
You can’t read Hilary Mantel’s all-absorbing Wolf Hall without feel absolutely compelled to read her Booker Award-winning sequel Bring Up The Bodies.
Naturally, this second volume doesn’t have the surprise you meet in Wolf Hall – namely the figure of Thomas Cromwell himself, Henry VIII’s first minister of state and fixer. Much vilified in the play A Man For All Seasons, for example (not least by Paul Scofield’s great performance as the doomed Thomas More), Cromwell emerges in Wolf Hall as a true original: a cosmopolitan, Euro-centric, anti-fanatical secularist: an essentially modern man.
The crux of Bring Up The Bodies is the multi-faceted problem posed by Henry’s fatigue with Anne Boleyn, who has failed to produce the requisite male heir. After having set Cromwell onto the problem of getting rid of wife number one, with all the attendant political and religious hassle, Cromwell, a savvy operator but essentially humane, now has to figure out how to finesse dumping number two.
It’s a tense and thrilling read, a treacherous and fascinating period in English history seen from the inside out, in a language that, miraculously, is both of its time and modern. How is that possible?
— Liz Nicholls
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
I’m actually not the kind of person who can’t put a book down, but I found myself ferociously gobbling this memoir.
That’s because it’s wise, and shows readers that redemption is possible, despite life’s pain and sadness, despite human frailty and our penchant for getting things wrong until we learn another way is possible.
The book follows Strayed during an 1,100-mile solo hike she took from California to Washington State in her mid-20s. The hike was an attempt to set herself straight after a number of tumultuous years following the death of her mother.
What Strayed ends up discovering is that sometimes, there are no answers. But still, life presents numerous ways to heal from even the hardest of situations.
— Liane Faulder
Minutes of the Last Meeting by Gene Fowler
Gene Fowler is a writing hero of mine; newspaperman, playwright, poet, screenwriter, biographer and close friend to such mid 20th century notables as John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, and the all but forgotten Sadakichi Hartmann.
They all turn up in Fowler’s second last book (published in 1954) a funny, wistful, elegantly written and discrete collection of anecdotes revolving around the irascible and impossible Hartmann, once declared King of Bohemia in the Greenwich Village of 1915.
The writing might seem a touch archaic for some, but it feels more like a generosity of spirit on Fowler’s part that he doesn’t reveal every single bruise and wart, or place his deceased friends too closely under the microscope. — Tom Murray
A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin
I’ve been engrossed by the A Song of Ice and Fire series, more popularly known as Game of Thrones. Written by George R. R. Martin, each of the five fantasy novels (two more are on the way) delve into topics of love and honour, pride and power, all while twisting an intricate tale of death and deception. The character development is particularly epic. If you’ve only seen the television adaptation, the books will blow your wool tunic off. — Amanda Ash
Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives by Thomas French
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Thomas French takes us behind the gates of Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo to explore the complex and nuanced issue of zoos in modern society.
Thoroughly researched and told engagingly, Zoo Story is a fascinating look at our complex relationship with animals in captivity – and, sometimes, the animals’ equally complex relationship with us.
In Edmonton, where debate continues to rage about the fate of Lucy the elephant, Zoo Story should be mandatory reading for those wanting to learn more about what it means to be a captive – and a keeper.
— Jana G. Pruden
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
I believe in providential reading: books should find me, and find me open.
So, I took the bait after discovering Moby Dick Big Read — a website with 135 celebrities reading a daily chapter in the hopes of erasing its status as the “great unread American novel” – and then, a few days later, Nathaniel Philbrick’s slender exhortation, Why Read Moby-Dick?
With Ishmael, I embarked on the Pequod in the monomaniacal search for the white whale. And I discovered a wildly erratic, hilarious and generous novel, rocked gently by the inscrutable tides of God.
— Brent Wittmeier
My favourite novel among many hours well spent on Kobo in 2012 is Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue.
Mea culpa on the Chabon thing — I am among his most slavish slaves. That said, who can resist contemporary storytelling at this exalted level — so readable and entertaining without losing a gram of literary heft. Throw in the pot classic vinyl records, politics, big box store aggression, the medical establishment, Jewishness, the Bay Area, America’s ongoing racial narrative — not to mention massive dollops of un-blindered humour and wisdom and it adds up to a near-perfect read, at least for this one.
— Alan Kellogg Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn At one point in Gillian Flynn’s masterfully paced Gone Girl, the book becomes impossible to put down until you finish it. Anyone who has read this book instantly knows what point I’m talking about. Anyone who hasn’t – wow, you are not living your best life.
Enter the twisted world of Nick Dunne, who opens the novel by lying to police regarding the disappearance of his wife Amy from their home one morning, leaving nothing but bloodstains, signs of a struggle, and a mysterious five-year-anniversary gift in Nick’s closet. You think you know what’s going on? You don’t. Not yet.
— David Johnston
Something Fierce, Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter by Carmen Aguirre
A completely captivating read for me during 2012 was Carmen Aguirre’s Something Fierce, Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter.
It’s rare to read anything on Latin American upheaval during the 1970s and ’80s that makes you laugh out loud. Aguirre’s heartfelt story of her teenage years in the Chilean resistance is poignant, but it’s also hilarious. She’s torn between political convictions and the craziness of being a teen discovering boys and rock music. Aguirre has written a most human and endearing account of life in an incredibly dangerous time.
— Janet Vlieg
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
There’s nothing I like better than a weighty tome, especially when it’s written as brilliantly as this one.
The historical detail unearthed by author Lawrence Hill — singer Dan Hill’s brother; who knew? — painted a vivid, and oftentimes brutal, picture of the slave trade.
— Jamie Hall
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Have just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It’s a memoir that came out in 2005 and deals with the year after the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, from cardiac arrest as they were sitting down to dinner in their New York apartment. (Magical thinking is thinking that if you hope for something enough or do the right thing the unavoidable can be avoided.)
It’s actually a therapeutic and enlightening read partly because Didion doesn’t wallow in sorrow and partly because she includes research on grief.
If you’ve had trouble moving forward after the death of a loved one her perspective might help by getting you to think more with your head and less with your heart.
— Chris Zdeb Gold by Chris Cleave Maybe it was because I read it around the time of the Summer Olympics in London, or possibly because Chris Cleave continues to be one of my favourite authors, but his novel Gold was hands-down my favourite book in 2012.
It follows the lives of two elite British cyclists who have competed against one another for more than a decade, and now must vie for one sole spot on the Olympic team for the London games.
The athletes’ lives are intertwined through more than sport, and the surrounding cast of husband, child and coach makes this a compelling human story.
Not as dark as Cleave’s previous books (Little Bee and Incendiary), Gold is an adrenalin rush of a read, beautifully paced just like the Olympic athletes whose lives it follows. And who knew that elite cyclists were paparazzi-fodder in England?
— Keri Sweetman
Read 2011’s Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C Gwynne’s harrowing, un-Disney-fied biography of the Comanche people, who ruthlessly, brutally owned massive stretches of the southwest to such a degree the young U.S. government called for their total destruction.
The story ends with the tale of their last chief, Quanah Parker, a halfbreed whose mother was taken by the warriors he would eventually lead. The account is sympathetic to all involved, just a giant mess of frontier men and women at violent odds with each other. It’s worth the trip, gore and all, especially because you know who eventually won.
— Fish Griwkowsky And Journal readers liked. . .
I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish
The best book of the 77 I have read in 2012 is in one I borrowed from the Edmonton Public Library — I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish.
What does it mean to live in Gaza? Fighting tremendous odds to finish high school, attend medical school, raise a family, lose family members and home to bombs, be humiliated each time you cross the border to work in Israel, never knowing if you’ll be able to fly to a conference.
— Cecily Mills
A tossup. I can’t (or don’t want to) choose between Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens, The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian or Little Big Man by Thomas Berger.
— Joe McWilliams Wild by Cheryl Strayed I have recently gotten back into serious reading after a 20 year spell of children’s books, short stories and magazines due to the demands of shiftwork and single parenthood.
I have been mostly underwhelmed with the selections I’ve made until I happened upon Wild by Cheryl Strayed after hearing her interviewed on the radio.
I loved her book, could literally not put it down. It involved everything I love in a good story and not at all what I would have expected from a non-fiction book - loss, danger, searching, adventure, excitement, thought and life lessons.
Who knew? I am in love with reading again!
— Darlene Horn
The Emperor of Paris by C.S. Richardson
The cover of C.S. Richardson’s 2012 book The Emperor of Paris is so stunningly beautiful that for the period of time I was reading it, I had the impulse to frame it and hang it on my wall. But the appeal of this book goes far beyond the artistry of the cover.
Through beautifully drawn sketches, the author introduces readers to a dyslexic baker, a disfigured restorer of paintings, and a handful of other engaging characters who inhabit post-First-World War Paris. The contents of The Emperor of Paris are as much a work of art as its cover.
— Suzanne Oswald
Stirring Memories: Reflections and Recipes
This book is a collection of 80, mostly local, recipes and the memories evoked by them, created by members of GANG (Grandmothers of Alberta for a New Generation) who reflected on and honoured their own heritage, family and friends while supporting African grandmothers caring for orphaned children.
The “best” part is the voluntary collaborative effort by those who compiled the book and those who contributed their memories and recipes, including Premier Alison Redford who submitted her grandmother’s recipe for shortbread.
A must-have gift for all those “women of a certain age” who have everything and need nothing as the book leaves space to add your own memories.
— Grace Hamilton One Shot by Lee Child One Shot is definitely the best book of 2012.
— Mike Dewes
Man Against the Desert by James H. Gray.
This book is about settling the prairies with all the hardships encountered, including the Dirty Thirties.
— Irene Apostal Bared to you by Sylvia Day — Barb Gendron
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
It took me awhile to get around to reading it, but it was worth it.
— Daniel Pietraszewski
Divergent by Veronica Roth changed my life.
— Fiona Jobin
Between a Rock and a Heart Place by Pat Benatar with Patsy Bale-Cox
— Derek Wicks
There were two books that I loved.
Both were published well before 2012 but, my goodness, Adrift 76 Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan is simply amazing. Read it on my eReader but had to get hard copy just to have and lend out. Amazing, amazing.
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Totally opens one’s mind. The story has never left my mind. Reminders every day when I see these young women walking among us.
— Audrey Handfield
The Brother’s Warner, Nowhere But Up
— Jason Broder The Phantom, Jo Nesbo — Dick Clarke