December 8, 2013 Christmas Wish List Event

[Gail Anderson-Dargatz]

Join 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Craig Davidson, 2013 Giller Prize longlisted nominee Elisabeth de Mariaffi, 2007 Giller Prize longlisted nominee Mary Novik, Eva Stachniak, Sandra Gulland, Catherine Bush and many other writers at our holiday wish list event on this forum December 8, 2013 from 9 am. to 11 am. PST (noon to 2 pm. ET). Writers will offer up their gift suggestions, and talk about the year's best books.

This event marks the "grand opening" of Gail's Kitchen and Gail's Classroom, Gail Anderson-Dargatz's teaching forum.

Other writers at our kitchen party include: four-time Juno award winner Chris Tarry, Lilian Nattel, June Hutton, Jen Sookfong Lee, Lucie Wilk, Michelle Barker, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, Barbara Lambert, Jono Lineen, Nerys Parry, Daniel Griffin, and many emerging writers.

 

[Gail Anderson-Dargatz]

Hello everyone!

I’m posting my welcome message now, on Saturday, as we have writers joining us from other countries and other time zones who may post early. Again, our conversation officially begins Sunday, December 8 at 9 a.m. PST or noon ET.

First off, thanks for coming! It’s wonderful to see all these familiar faces and names gathered in one place!

I’ll serve as moderator for our highly informal ‘panel discussion’ on this year’s books, but please, just jump right in and post your holiday wish lists or gift suggestions and comments.

As you post your lists, please also post a link to your website, as an introduction for those listening in.

So, let’s begin! What books are you giving this holiday season? What books are you hoping to get as gifts? What books made your own ‘best books of the year’ list?

 

[Katherin Edwards]

How lovely to here! Thanks so much for this Gail.
Gift ideas are always appreciated.
From me to others..hm... let's see. To a friend in Austria, I have sent Richard Wagamese's book, "Indian Horse." It was one of my top five reads this year. I believe it to be a necessary book in understanding Canada and a piece of her history. Mr. Wagamese writes with a clean, cool, unwavering gaze that makes one weep in shame for our past, and as a writer I shed tears at the beauty of his remarkably effective simplistic sentences.
Another gift I am sending afar this year is Bill Gaston's, "The World". I've been a fan for many years and "The World" is a book that I can't help but recommend. Structurally it's unusual and flawless and its characters memorable.
To a family member I am giving Rosie Daykin's "Butter Baked Goods." (nostalgic recipes from a little neighborhood bakery)It's a lovely hard covered book on baking complete with scrumptious looking desserts.
What I would love to receive would be a few moleskin notebooks Always handy for story ideas. Also any book from the Folio Society would be high on my list.
That's a start anyway! I look forward to seeing what everyone else is dreaming about for this upcoming holiday!
www.katherinedwards.com

 

[Jono Lineen]

Living in Australia these days it’s interesting how little Canadian writing is actually available down under and conversely now that I think about it how little Aussie writing is available in the North. So I would like to recommend a few books that Canadians may not have come across but are easily available in e-versions and are very well worth reading.
Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser is an amazing novel that juxtaposes the experiences of two ‘travelers’ indicative of contemporary Australia but just as representative of present-day Canada. One is a peripatetic writer and editor of travel guides, the other an asylum seeker. The collision of the two results in a beautifully written book that encapsulates so much of our modern world. It's hard not to see yourself into the narrative.
In non-fiction I would recommend Tim Cope’s On the Trail of Genghis Khan, an account of his three-year horse trek from Mongolia to Hungary tracing the path of the Mongols from Central Asia to Europe. It is a detailed account of the journey but Cope’s research into the area is what makes the book special. His love of nomad culture shines through on every page.
Literary highlight of the year would have to be Eleanor Catton winning the Big B. (even though my old friend Oliver Kellhammer’s wife was on the short list with a wonderful book). Catton is an insanely talented writer with a VERY long future ahead of her, although I thought it was a distant grab for Canada to call her its own.

jonolineen

 

[Michelle Barker]

This little kitchen party couldn’t have happened at a better time. I am looking for some good books to take with me on vacation, so I will be eagerly reading everyone’s suggestions.

One of my favourite reads this year was Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. I’m also extremely fond of Eric Puchner’s short story collection, Music Through the Floor. I’ve been giving Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch to poet-friends, though I will be picking up Katherena Vermette’s North End Love Songs for sure.

As for literary events, well, isn’t there something wonderfully karmic about Alice Munro winning the Nobel after David Gilmour’s comments about there being no female writers worth teaching?

 

[Lilian Nattel]

How lovely to here! Thanks so much for this Gail.
Gift ideas are always appreciated.
From me to others..hm... let's see. To a friend in Austria, I have sent Richard Wagamese's book, "Indian Horse." It was one of my top five reads this year. www.katherinedwards.com

Great choice! I really liked Indian Horse. It's also a good YA read. My older d read it last year when she was 14 and liked it very much too.

 

[Nikki Vogel]

I have been super focused on short stories recently as inspiration toward my thesis project. Lynn Coady's Giller prize winning collection Hellgoing was, expectedly, fantastic. Chris Tarry recommended Sam Lipsyte's The Fun Parts, and though I haven't finished reading the collection, so far I have loved every story. His comedic timing is spot on. I also recently read The Best American Short Stories 2013 and while I didn't love every story in the collection, there were a couple of shining gems that made the purchase well worth it.

 

[Eva Stachniak]

Thanks Gail, for hosting this,
Books I want to give:

Oh, My Darling, a collections of short stories by my wonderful writer/friend Shaena Lambert. This is a superb collection touching on life’s pivotal moments. I have reviewed it on Goodreads.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/718771997

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waals, the astonishing story of the Ephrussis' fortunes. This is a book I received as a gift and I want to pass it on. A wonderful family story, a meditation on history, time, loss and art. Edmund de Waals is a distinguished English potter and the story of raise and fall of his family follows a story of a netsuke collection he inherited from his uncle. This is a book which I have marked for passages I want to re-read and re-think.

“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

Mary Swan, My Ghosts.
I loved this book, a meditation on time, family ties, stories of childhood and parenthood. It is a book about being part of a family and of being alone, beautifully written and woven out of fragments that create a mesmerizing whole.

On the lighter side:

Reasons Mommy Drinks, by Lyranda Martin-Evans and Fiona Stevenson. Maybe because I have just become a grandmother and I have been helping out, but this book brought many many smiles and nods of recognition. I haven’t tried many of the cocktail recipes, I must confess, but the vignettes of new parents coping and not quite coping are wonderful.

Eva
www.evastachniak.com

 

[Sandra Gulland]

Hi Everyone, I'm posting a little early because I will be dropping in and out. It's great to have this forum! (Very impressive, Gail!)
I just finished reading a book I recommend giving to writers:
Odd Type Writers: from Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors, by Celia Blue Johnson. It's inspiring, gossipy and fun. Any writer or aspiring writer would love it, I think. I certainly did. It's one of those books you think of people to buy it for as you're reading it.
For the teen girl on your list, I highly recommend Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowen. Set in 1986, this is a very tender story of a growing relationship between two 16-year-old misfits—chubby, eccentric Eleanor, the object of bullies, and her seat-mate on the school bus, Asian nerd Park.
Another supremely popular and wonderful teen novel, not new this year but a perrenial on the "best of" lists, is John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, a witty, tremendously moving story of first love between two teens who meet in a cancer group. (Green, by the way, gave Rowell's novel a glowing review in the NYTimes.)
For Austen fans, the annotated and visually lush edition of Pride & Prejudice published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press is simply wonderful. (Emma in this series is on my Santa Wish list.)
As a delicious indulgence, I've also asked for a title from the Penguin Dropped Caps series—lush little books that are a sensuous pleasure to hold and look at. I'd like the entire series, frankly, but I've specifically asked Santa for Madame Bovary by Flaubert in the series—a new translation by the wonderful Lydia Davis.
Also! So many wonderful new Canadian novels out this year:
Emancipation Day, by Wayne Grady.
Studio St. Ex by Ania Szado.
Mary Novik's Muse.
Cathy Buchanan's The Painted Girls.
These are all fantastic novels.

 

[Sandra Gulland]

Eva, I'm so happy to see a new Mary Swan novel out. I adored her The Boys in the Trees.

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waals has been recommended to me by quite a few people!

 

[Nerys Parry]

2013 for me was a year of looking back, first because I hit the big 4-0 last year, and second because I’ve been working on a memoir. As a consequence, most of my reading of late has been of old novels, literary memoirs and curmudgeonly history books. I’ve also been writing a fiction that requires a certain knowledge of financial institutions, so there’s been a lot of reading in that area as well. Still, I have managed to find a few gems during my research, which I’d highly recommend.

The first is The Financier by Theodore Dreiser. One of my favourite writers, Dreiser captures the psychology of greed in the rise and fall of financier Henry Cowperwood. Dreiser based the events of the story on the life of a real financier, Charles Tyson Yerkes, but the amazing thing about this novel is how much it still reveals about the players involved in the recent financial crisis, where corporate executives felt justified in their million dollar bonuses after declaring bankruptcy. To better understand how we got where we got in our financial institutions, it helps to go back to where it all started with The Financier.

In terms of memoirs, I finally read The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr, and would recommend that book for anyone who has ever had to recover from a difficult childhood. What makes her memoir so beautiful (besides the superb writing) is the strength of the love and compassion she feels for her family, despite the horrible things they do to each other. Not exactly uplifting, but not depressing in any way, The Liar’s Club is beautifully touching and gloriously brave.

Last, my three great fictional reads from this past year:

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, 1963, a Samurai who conducted seppuku, a traditional Samurai suicide, when he’d completed all his planned literary works. This particular novel tells the story of a freedom-loving sailor who becomes involved with a widow in a port city. He is at first idealized by the woman’s teenage son as the image of all that is manhood, but when the widow and sailor decide to marry and the sailor to give up the sea, the son feels the sailor has ‘compromised’ his greatness and must be punished. What follows is uncompromising and unflinching. It’s a chilling, shocking story of the dangers of idealization and perspectivism, and an unforgettable read.

The second fiction (and thankfully a little lighter than Mishimi’s) is Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I was talking with the fiction editor of Goose Lane in the line-up to have a book signed and we both had the same experience with this novel. We had both come to it while in a state of literary weariness, for lack of a better term, but Freedom made us passionately love reading again. It’s a fantastic, gripping, not-put-downable story about three modern Americans trying to make sense and meaning out of their lives. Light enough for a beach read, heavy enough to haunt you for days, Freedom is one of the best reads around.


And, to speak to Jono’s being in Australia, I was there last year and discovered Gould’s Book of Fish by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan. A great read from the antipodes, this is an epic tale of the settlement of Tasmania and one man’s descent into madness.

As for my wish list, there are so many! Here's my top list so far:
The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever by Adam Leith Goliner.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton,

A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam

 

[Lilian Nattel]

I echo Eva on My Ghosts. I just finished reading The Final Solution: A Detection Story by Michael Chabon, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, though he is never specifically named. It's a short novel, a form I happen to love. I reviewed it here on Goodreads. Perfect for your literary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fans.

 

[Eva Stachniak]

Lovely reading all these recommendations!
And here are the books I would like to see under my Christmas tree:

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, a literary biography of one of my favourite writers. I have admired and studied Fitzgerald’s brilliant historical novels: The Blue Flower and The Beginning of Spring. I love her use of details in writing, and her matter-of-cat style which carries wonderful resonance in it.

Jill Lepore, Book of Ages; The life and opinions of Jane Franklin.
I read Lepore’s essay on how she came to write this book in The New Yorker and listened to Jill Lepore talk about Jane Franklin. I find Lepore’s writing both compelling and moving. In Jane Franklin she has found a topic that is close to my heart, a life of an extraordinary 18th century woman who was by virtue of her gender and class restricted in her life choices. I’d like to immerse myself in it.

Longbourne by Jo Baker. Apart from all the praise I read about Baker’s novel I love the thought of one book of fiction (Pride and Prejudice) opening into another novel, written from the point of view of another character.


Journey to the Abyss— 900 page memoirs of Count Harry Kessler—1880-1918. Translated and edited by Laird M. Easton, an unusual guided tour of belle époque and post-war world of Paris, Berlin and London. Kessler was an astute observer and he missed little of the essence: He was friends with Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Cocteau and other luminaries of the post-war world. The diaries were found in a safety deposit box on the island of Mallorca—when a 50 year lease expired.
Eva

 

[Lilian Nattel]

The first is The Financier by Theodore Dreiser. One of my favourite writers,

Dresier is a dynamic writer. He captures Chicago like no one else.

 

[Eva Stachniak]

Eva, I'm so happy to see a new Mary Swan novel out. I adored her The Boys in the Trees.

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waals has been recommended to me by quite a few people!

I second your recommendation of the novels by Ania Szado, Cathy Marie Buchanan and Mary Novik. Great reads!

 

[Gail Anderson-Dargatz]

Good morning everyone! Wow. Look at all these great lists. I'm especially delighted to see books that may not have made the big lists, like the Globe and Mail's 100 Best Canadian Fiction. A special thanks to Jono for the suggestions from down under!

 

[Barbara Lambert]

Hello everyone -- I see I'm late to the party, west-coaster as I am. So I'll post my faves quickly and then rush back and see what you-all have posted:
Top of my 2013 favorite book list is the short story collection Oh, My Darling, by Shaena Lambert, whose Mom I am lucky enough to be.

Beyond that, I’ll list just five novels – though if there were time the list would be much longer – and one non-fiction work.

Each of the novels took me, one way or another, to places I had not been before – distinct not just in time and situation, but in their revelations of human spirit.
The Round House, by Louise Erdrich,
Curiosity, by Joan Thomas
Suite Francaise by Irene Némirovsky
Muse by Mary Novik
Three Souls by Janie Chang.

And in non-fiction, Letters to my Daughters, by the Afghan Member of Parliament, Fawzia Koofi.

Oooops in my rush I forgot to post my website which is: http://barbaralambert.com/writer/author/subject/11 -- or alternatively, just www.barbaralambert.com

 

[Barbara Lambert]

Eva, I'm so happy to see a new Mary Swan novel out. I adored her The Boys in the Trees.

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waals has been recommended to me by quite a few people!

Oh my, I LOVED this book -- have it on my coffee table and dip into it often -- and tell everyone about it. Likeewise The boys in the Trees. We seem to think alike!

 

[Eva Stachniak]

I echo Eva on My Ghosts. I just finished reading The Final Solution: A Detection Story by Michael Chabon, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, though he is never specifically named. It's a short novel, a form I happen to love. I reviewed it here on Goodreads. Perfect for your literary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fans.

I love Michael Chabon! Read his The Yiddish Policemen's Union last year...great writer!

 

[June Hutton]

Hello everyone, and thank you Gail for the invitation.

The list is a mash-up of books I’ve enjoyed this year, am giving for Christmas, or would like to receive:
Recent titles of all authors participating in today’s forum, of course. (Full disclosure, I know Mary Novik so not only read her gorgeous Muse but also an earlier manuscript version.)
Black Liquor by Dennis E. Bolen (because the world needs more poetry)
The Orenda by Joseph Boyden (I hear it’s good)
Kicking the Sky by Anthony De Sa (I know it’s good)
The Illuminaries by Eleanor Catton (for an inlaw who is fond of New Zealand)
Three Souls by Janie Chang
Harvest by Jim Crace (loved his quirky Being Dead)
419 by Will Ferguson (paperback release this year, and I have a family member in mind for it)
Emancipation Day by Wayne Grady (Windsorites in the family, too)
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Oh, My Darling by Shaena Lambert (for short story lovers)
The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild by Murray Reiss (because the world needs even more poetry)
My Ghosts by Mary Swan
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese