Robert Fulford, Rex Murphy, Terry Glavin, and more share their holiday reads.

Get a new e-reader in your stocking? Have some book store gift cards to use up? The National Post’s editors and columnists offer their tips for your holiday reading

A creepy and compelling entry into a checkered genre, well worth checking out ... if you’re into that sort of thing

Jen Gerson on Annihilation

Girl on the Train

It’s not that Paula Hawkins’s Girl on the Train was the best book of the year — it’s just that the novel had me turning pages faster than anything else I read in 2015. And it’s not merely that Girl on the Train combines the best elements of the lesser novel Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and TV’s fantastic Broadchurch ( British version, first season, please). In fact, Hawkins’s greatest achievement here may be her originality. My first instinct is to try to describe the suspenseful thriller by comparing it with other works, but it’s ultimately a fresh book with a surprise that doesn’t leave you feeling manipulated. (I hope Ms. Flynn will take note of this last quality, as I’m still recovering from the psychological whiplash she caused me.)

But maybe the best thing about Girl on the Train is the characters — especially the women — who are crafted with more thought and care than they need be given that the strong plotting could have done all the heavy lifting on its own.

The novel is not perfect. But it’s the perfect read for a lazy holiday afternoon when the normal demands of life can be ignored in favour of gorging on an irresistible story.

— Marni Soupcoff is a National Post columnist and the executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

The God That Failed: Why Six great Writers Rejected Communism

Published in 1950, and now in scarce supply, The God That Failed: Why Six great Writers Rejected Communism, is still relevant in explaining the mindset of intellectuals who prefer risking faith in a revolutionary utopianism to the imperfections and plodding pace of democratic amelioration.

In the years between the October Revolution of 1917 and the StalinHitler Pact of 1939, Russia’s great experiment drew an unusual number of intellectuals who, having lost faith in democracy, and alienated from the sources of Western values, thought they had found the Kingdom of God in which inequalities of class and race would be dissolved and Fascism defeated. Dispassionately and exquisitely written, these essays by Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, André Gide, Ignazio Silone, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender recreate, with foreknowledge, the rapture of political messianism and the anguish of disillusion.

This slim volume has lessons for today. Like Islamism, Communism offered nothing but demanded everything. For a time the escape from spiritual uncertainty, the joy of sacrifice, comradeship in the struggle and submission to a higher purpose sufficed. Hypnotized, neither intelligence nor common sense nor the evils they witnessed could dissuade them. The tipping point in each writer’s conscience was unique, and essentially a mystery.

— Barbara Kay is a National Post columnist.

Dead Wake

Hosting a premier screening of the film Titanic in 1997, I told the audience not to be surprised when the ship went down. I was booed. It’s a quirk of human nature that even when we know the ending to a story we remain gripped in the suspense of how it could all end otherwise.

In Dead Wake, Eric Larson places you on the deck of the ocean liner Lusitania on a sunny afternoon in May 1915, as those on board watch a German torpedo elegantly gliding toward the ship. He brings the days at sea to life: the gallows humour of its passengers who were warned it could be sunk as well as the giddy excitement of new parents, newlyweds, barons and socialites bound for Europe at the start of the Edwardian summer season.

More gripping is the tense, grimy, confined lives of German submariners and their sanguine commander who watched the ship and its passengers’ agony in silent pantomime through his periscope.

Larson writes of t he missed warnings and the ones that weren’t sent so not to tip off the Germans that their codes had been broken. The Lusitania took almost 1,200 passengers to their deaths within sight of land. It could all have been otherwise.

— John Moore is a National Post columnist and host of Moore in the Morning on Toronto’s NewsTalk 1010.

Markets without Limits:

Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests

In 2010, 3,500 Canadians were on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Some were lucky and received trans plants from friends, family or altruistic strangers. But others were not so lucky — 18 people died while waiting on that list.

Part of the problem is that the demand for organs far exceeds the supply. Where such commodities are handled by the market, the price rises, causing more to be produced and sold. The reason some items — such as organs, blood and sex — are not allowed to be bought and sold like any other commodity is largely a result of the theories put forth by “anti- commodification theorists.”

In the new book, Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests, authors Jason F. Brennan Peter Jaworski of Georgetown University tackle these theorists head- on. They recognize that capitalism is single- handedly responsible for making us rich and that the solution to many of our problems, such as a shortage of organ donors, is not “to contract the market,” but “to expand it.”

The book makes a compelling and well- articulated case t hat, while there are “things that should not be bought and sold … they are things people shouldn’t have in the first place” — like child porn or nuclear weapons. For other things, the world would be much better off if we simply followed the saying: “If you may do it for free, then you may do it for money.”

— Jesse Kline is a member of the National Post editorial board and an editor in the paper’s Comment section.

Annihilation

Most science fiction is bad, it has to be said. As an ardent fan of space opera, even I have to concede very few authors seem to be able to blend a truly scientific imagination with literary talent. Much of it seems to rely on fiction tropes that offer nothing distinctive aside from being set in the future or in space. But when science fiction is good, it’s really, really good. It’s not just entertainment, it’s a head trip, encouraging the reader to picture alternate possibilities and abstract theories in ways that haunt the reader and forever changes the way he imagines humanity’s place in the universe.

Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer, isn’t quite there, but it’s just so gloriously weird that it’s worth a read, nonetheless. The story follows an unnamed biologist as she and a fellow team of explorers wander into the mysterious“Area X ,” a place that seems to have been enveloped — for that’s the only way to put it — by some kind of ecological disaster that is not just destroying the local flora and fauna, but changing it.

It’s also changing the people who come in to study it. And then the biologist begins to change, herself. A passage in which the narrator describes going to pieces upon discovering a rare kind of starfish known as the Destroyer of Worlds is particularly memorable.

Meanwhile, the Southern Reach is the name of government agency tasked with sending doomed explorers into the breach. Their role isn’t elaborated on until the second novel in the series.

Annihilation is a creepy and compelling entry into a checkered genre, well worth checking out ... if you’re into that sort of thing.

— Jen Gerson is a National Post columnist.

The Good Nurse: A True

Story of Medicine, Madness , and Murder

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder is the best and worst type of thriller: best because of t he meticulousness of the retelling, the detail in its design. What does someone’s face look like when they’re dying of insulin poisoning? Do you know how much Digoxin it takes to stop a human heart? What does a serial killer nurse — one believed to be the most prolific serial killer in history — do after he’s injected yet another one of his patients with a fatal dose of whatever he found in the hospital drug closet?

And yet, the book is the worst type of thriller because it’s intimately real, one whereby the reader comes to realize that this could have happened in any hospital, in any city, to any number of patients around the world. And in many respects, it probably still could.

The Good Nurse is a chilling retelling of the story of Charles Cullen, a New Jersey nurse who killed at least 40 people while working at various hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. With extraordinary detail and unprecedented access, Charles Graeber describes how Cullen turned his hospital scrubs into his killing uniform, leaving a trail of poisoned patients behind at hospitals for 16 years.

Even after his arrest in 2003, there is little clarity as to Cullen’s motive — indeed, many of his victims were in good health, thus disqualifying the notion that these were mercy killings — which leaves the reader to deduce whether Cullen was a deranged psychopath or a troubled sadist who just wanted to see what grasshoppers look like under the heat of his magnifying glass.

Still, the most horrific aspect of The Good Nurse is in its description of the parade of administrative failures that allowed Cullen to keep working, despite numerous firings, damning coroners reports, destroyed records and apparent efforts from hospital administrators to look the other way to protect their own institutional reputations. It is a fascinating, frustrating, unnerving work of nonfiction, and one that is not recommended for hospital patients.

— Robyn Urback is a National Post columnist and a member of the paper’s editorial board.

Project Animal Farm

Gifts under the tree? Gingerbread cookies in the oven? Football on t el e vi s i on? The holidays are one big sociological dystopia. Consumerism is ruining our collective secular soul. Yuletide sugar binges make us fat and grumpy. And all those college bowl games are really just three- hour head- trauma festivals. In this enlightened age, the only remaining untainted holiday ritual we have left is the Christmas turkey.

Oh wait, now that’s been ruined, too: In her newly published book, Project Animal Farm, Pakistani- Canadian author Sonia Faruqi details her eyewitness observations of animal-handling practices at the industrial farms of southern Ontario. The husbandry and slaughter methods that Faruqi observes are so brutal that even the humans involved in the process end up scarred by a form of PTSD.

Faruqi didn’t come to this project as an activist. Just the opposite: she was a laid off Wall Street investment banker who began snooping around farms as a complete dilettante. Ironically, her status as a neophyte actually increases her credibility — because she doesn’t bombard the reader with jargon or ideology. She just tells us what she saw.

The news isn’t all bleak: Faruqi also visits smaller pastoral farms where animals live well and die humanely. In other words, you don’t have to go vegetarian to stop the torture on industrial farms. Read this book, and 2016 may well become the year when you resolve to keep animal-abuse off your dinner plate.

— Jonathan Kay is editor-in- chief of The Walrus and a National Post columnist.

Dave vs. The Monsters

If Tom Clancy’s oeuvre was bl e nded wit h J.R.R. Tolkien’s, the result would look a lot like this year’s Dave vs. The Monsters trilogy. Australian novelist John Birmingham specializes in offbeat, highly realistic depictions of how we would react — economically, socially, politically and militarily — to utterly bonkers events. You have to swallow the initial doozy he’ll throw at you — but it’s all frighteningly plausible from there.

In this trilogy, the highly unlikeable Dave Hooper finds himself at the point where two worlds collide. The first world is ours, Earth, circa 2015 — an oil rig off the Gulf Coast, specifically. The second is a demonic underworld of orcs, brutes, and dragons, who cherish ancient fables of when they freely roamed the world of above, feasting on succulent human flesh.

Once the barrier separating the worlds — hinted to have been established eons ago by merciful aliens — begins to collapse, it’s suddenly a full- on war of annihilation between legions of monsters and our modern military machines. A legion of orcs may not fare well against a wing of B- 52s, but how long will the society that keeps those jets flying hold out when bumps in the night truly are monsters?

Bonkers, I know. But if you make it 30 pages into the first book, you won’t be able to stop until the end of the third. And you’ll be craving more.

— Matt Gurney is a columnist and editor of the National Post comment section, and host of National Post Radio, on SiriusXM’s channel 167.

Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty- three of the World’s Best Poems

Early on in his mixed career as philosopher/ critic/ poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote one of the most captivating, enigmatic and lyrical poems that the English language has to offer — the incantatory Kublai Khan. Its opening lines are known to just about everyone who has read any poetry: In Xanadu did Kublai Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree. Following that insistent declaration is an eldritch outpouring that tells ( among other things) of “caverns measureless to man,” of a “savage place” where a “waning moon” dimly shines on a “woman wailing for her demon lover.” Then, an almost oracular sequence, reporting amid the “tumult” of a nightmare river falling into a “lifeless ocean” that “meantime” Kubla heard from “afar/Ancestral voices prophesying war.”

It is a poem to encounter, a poem to let rest in the mind and perform its work. And should you really wish to explore the richness of Kublai Khan, understand its point, its workings, and what it says of poetry itself, there is no better guide that Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty- three of the World’s Best Poems. Her book stays with its 43 poems, dwells on their actual words, their backgrounds and allusions, and is, overall, one of the finest modern guides to the reception and appreciation of poetry I have seen.

From George Herbert to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Sylvia Plath and more, Paglia beautifully and intelligently performs an act of rescue to the teaching of literature, restoring it from the ideological battlefield it has frequently become, to the delights of literature being valued for itself, and for poetry as literature’s central force, and the language of poetry as a union of high craft and pure inspiration.

— Rex Murphy is a columnist for the National Post and a regular commentator on CBC’s The National.

Enlightenment 2.0

I have had quite enough of books for one year, to be perfectly honest. Having been conscripted to serve on the Writers Trust’s Shaughnessy Cohen Prize j ury, it took months for my want- to- read pile to reassert itself from the shadow of a towering got- to- read stack.

But now that I’ve gone and made what was a delight and a privilege sound like drudgery, I should praise at least the prize winner, which was Joseph Heath’s magnificent Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives.

Long story short: big book, big ideas. A lively survey of just how deeply the rot of unreason has come to run in liberal democracies. It’s gotten so that any analysis deriving from a conventional leftright spectrum is less helpful in comprehending politics and policy than a close discernment of the sensible from the plum crazy. You could say Heath’s thesis anticipates Donald Trump’s f ront- running presidential candidacy.

ISIS : Inside the Army

of Terror

While we are conveniently on the subject of unreason I can turn to the other book I want to make a fuss over. It’s ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, the terrific investigation Michael Weiss and co- author Hassan Hassan have undertaken into the 21st century’s event horizon of irrationality — the Baathist- Islamic caliphate also known as ISIL, also known as Daesh. The book is as good as investigative journalism gets these days, and a triumph of storytelling.

Unreasonable readers prefer to have their prejudices confirmed, and so will be disappointed to learn that no, it isn’t all George W. Bush’s fault, and neither is ISIL merely the fault of Islam or some recrudescence of immutable ancient hatreds. For all its nostalgia for the glory days of medieval genocide, ISIL is very much a post- modern phenomenon, a highly mechanized doomsday cult and a virtual- reality complex of bloodthirsty unreason and terror that has attracted thousands of Europeans and North Americans to its black banner. This matters. So does a proper understanding of what we’re dealing with here.

Not the most festive sort of reading, I admit, no more than the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black is a cheery Yuletide carol. But Weiss and Hassan have written a hell of a book, and reading it will do you good.

— Terry Glavin is a National Post columnist.

On the Move: A Life

As a neurologist, Oliver Sacks never met a patient who didn’t teach him something. Every complaint was different and he considered everyone unique. His reward was in the stories that he turned into brilliant books about the brain — “neurological novels,” he called them. They included The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, about a patient who couldn’t decipher what his eyes saw, and Awakenings, about a rare form of encephalitis, which evolved into a film that starred Robin Williams as a Sacks- like doctor and Robert De Niro as a patient.

Sacks, who died at age 82 in August, told some of his best stories in his memoirs, On the Move: A Life ( Knopf Canada), my favourite book of 2015.

It’s the drama of a talented man who overcame parental mortification over his homosexuality and stumbled a few times on his way to a superb career. He moved from his birthplace in London to California and then New York. He became an avid motorcyclist and briefly served as unpaid doctor to a Hells Angels troupe. He was weightlifting champion, he fought off an amphetamines addiction and he suffered the pirating of his research by his boss. “I had always liked to see myself as a naturalist or explorer,” he once wrote. And his talent for narrative made all these revelations into a rich experience for his readers.

— Robert Fulford is a National Post columnist.

Marcus Alonzo Hanna:

His Life And Work

I think I will be suspected of deliberately making a bizarre, obscure choice, but I swear the strangest and most interesting book I read in 2015 was Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life And Work ( 1912) by Herbert Croly. The name of Croly ( 1869-1930), a founder of the original New Republic magazine, was once synonymous with American liberal thought: he had a big influence, for example, on both Roosevelts. His idealistic vapourings about civilization are no longer read, but his Mark Hanna biography, written to earn a quick buck, is a secret gem.

Mark Hanna ( 1837-1904) was the Ohio businessman best known as the silent partner who made McKinley president. He did this by creating the mass-market political operation, pretty much in the form it still has; modern campaigns are Mark Hanna plus phones and computers. Croly was hired by Hanna’s family to write a friendly biography of a Machiavellian visionary who was basically his complete opposite. The resulting book is awkward: sometimes the excuses Croly makes for 19th- century shenanigans are embarrassing. But the family wanted an honest record of what Hanna built and was not afraid to share some remarkable lore that would otherwise have been lost. Strongly recommended to political professionals.

— Colby Cosh is a National Post columnist.

King James New Testament

What better to read or reread at Christmastime than a Jesus story? Specifically the King James New Testament.

For one thing, Biblical references pervade Western culture so you can hardly make sense of anything more than a few decades old without grasping them. I grant that the Old Testament is quite a slog in places. But never to have read at least the New Testament is to run a major risk of being an incoherent ignoramus, which helps explain much that has come since the 1960s.

Also, the King James specifically is the shining zenith of the English language, above even Shakespeare. Reading it improves the rhythm, vocabulary and resonance of your own speech and writing. Martin Luther King’s magnificent “I Have a Dream,” for instance, would have been impossible without immersion in its prose.

It’s not all crassly practical. King was a great speaker and leader because he was also immersed in the Bible morally and theologically. And it pervades culture from late Roman times through the 1960s because, despite shallow modern dismissals, most people including the most brilliant believed it the most important book ever written.

Perhaps they were right. You certainly owe it to yourself to check.

— John Robson is a National Post columnist.

Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb

Paul Virilio’s snarky but thoughtful treatise on the Internet, The Information Bomb, was first published 15 years ago, but reading the prominent French philosopher’s now- cold take on the technology from which we’ve built our day- to- day lives still feels fresh and insightful, even if it was written well before the advent of Facebook and Twitter. In a series of essays, Virilio takes aim at the culture of the Net and the divorce between science and ethics. Anticipating the data- driven nature of web ( and state) surveillance, Virilio outlines a case for privacy, for esthetic experiences, and most importantly, for what turned out to be a very prescient skepticism.

Part of the pleasure of reading The Information Bomb is in that prescience, of course, but mostly the book is bristling and good for Virilio’s ability to, however uncharacteristic it may be of his fellow French theorists, get the damn point. His point, in the year 2000, was that we don’t know yet what we’re doing when it comes to taking our lives online, and he’s not wrong, not even 15 years on. Sharp and fun and full of reminders of what might have been, Virilio’s cynical take on the dawn of Big Data left me feeling relatively hopeful — the more things change, the saying goes, the more they stay the same.

— Emily M. Keeler is the National Post’s books editor.

A fascinating, unnerving work of nonfiction, and one that is not recommended for hospital patients

Robyn Urback on The Good Nurse Read this, and 2016 may well become the year when you resolve to keep animal-abuse off your dinner plate

Jonathan Kay on Project Animal Farm

What better to read or reread at Christmastime than a Jesus story?

Specifically King James

John Robson on King James New Testament