TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 3

Posted 12 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 |

In TSR’s continuing series of year-end lists, we today spotlight August C. Bourré, whose Reading 2007 project involved him reviewing every title he read over the past calendar year. The complete set of reviews is available on his blog, Vestige.org.

August C. Bourré:

This sounds like fun, and it actually didn’t take me long to come up with a list (mine will have to all go under the category of “classics,” because I don’t generally read books in the year they are published; I don’t often have the scratch to buy hardcover books). Below is a list of my favourite six books from the last year, including comments and a link to my blog post about each.

My list:

1. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

My head nearly exploded after reading this one. It has all the classic Dick hallmarks of paranoia, drugs, and alternate realities, but it hit home for me in a way that none of his other have. What could have been intellectual games-playing struck an emotional chord in me, and I found myself excited about this book in a way that I still can’t fully articulate. You can read my initial comments here.

2. Famous Last Words, by Timothy Findley

It’s a truism that Canadians are endlessly concerned about their identity, not just in terms of how we see ourselves, but in how the outside world views us. I have been told on more than one occasion by American bibliophile friends that Canada lacks any truly great works of literature, that no Canadian author can ever stand shoulder to shoulder with even a mid-list American. We lack a solid enough culture to support any such work. Famous Last Words is a book to be thrown in the faces of such people. Not only is it a book that we can acknowledge the excellence of here at home, it’s a book that we can be confident will have a respected life outside our borders. I wouldn’t suggest it’s our “national novel” (if such a thing could ever exist), but it’s a novel that I think calms much of what is most fickle about us. You can read my initial impression of the novel here.

3. Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein

Despite coming from a family with strong military ties, I have never been one for the military, nor for involving violence in the politics of the everyday. In Starship Troopers, Heinlein makes the case for a more militaristic style of democracy and an abandonment of many of the values and principles that I, as a liberal, hold dear. The book did not cause me to let go of any of my beliefs, but it did challenge them to the point that I no longer feel like I could successfully defend them. This book has affected me in a way that no other book has, which is something I didn’t expect from so-called “pulp” science fiction. I now feel like it’s my responsibility to better understand why I believe what I believe, even if it takes years of hard work and introspection to come to such an understanding. You can read my first impression of the book here.

4. Childhood, by André Alexis

If nothing else, this book proves that authors can experiment with form and remain accessible and emotionally engaging. You can read my initial response here.

5. Who Do You Think You Are?, by Alice Munro

For several years, both publicly and privately, I have spoken out about what I see as the dismal state of the Canadian short story. I have long felt that, as a form, it has become predictable and very conservative. Even “experimental” pieces have become predictable. Having read this book by Alice Munro, however, I see that it is not the short story that needs to be rethought, but rather that there are simply too few masters and far, far too many pretenders. Decades after the stories were published, they still feel new and vibrant, though many of them conform to what I had previously thought of as the most clichéd ideas of what the short story should be. My initial impression of the book can be read here.

6. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch

This book was sophisticated in a way that few contemporary novels seem to be. The characters are sharply drawn and very, very real, but even the worst of them is allowed a certain amount of dignity, even if it’s never exposed to the light of the world. Murdoch seems to care about her characters as much as about writing, and so they are alive and their world is real to an extent that I could never imagine from a Dave Eggers or a Michael Winter. Novels like this are the reason I apply the word “writer” to many, but “author” to only a few. You can read my initial response here. [Ed. note: This review is worth reading especially for the comment from Bourré’s professor about Murdoch’s relation to A.S. Byatt.]

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Keep checking back throughout the week for more faves from 2007. The complete collection can be found by clicking on the category link Favourite Books of 2007.

4 comments to “TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 3”

Panic, December 12th, 2007 at 11:35 am:

• I’ve tried to read Murdoch in the past (I forget which book now), and it didn’t go so well. That said, I love Byatt with the heat of a thousand suns, so it’s likely I should give Murdoch another go.

Finn Harvor, December 13th, 2007 at 9:26 pm:

• “I have been told on more than one occasion by American bibliophile friends that Canada lacks any truly great works of literature, that no Canadian author can ever stand shoulder to shoulder with even a mid-list American.”

  Did they offer examples? Supporting arguments?

August, December 14th, 2007 at 1:37 am:

• Generally the people in question don’t actually know anything about Canadian literature, but they hold up that damned Great Gatsby as the pinnacle of literary achievement and simply can’t imagine that we could have anything as worthwhile, because were *Canada, the most boring nation on Earth*. Of course many of these same people somehow manage to claim Nabokov as an American writer because he lived there for a few years. So frustrating (and for the record, I despise Gatsby).

Finn Harvor, December 15th, 2007 at 4:14 am:

• August, thanks for the detail. Yep, frustrating.

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