TSR Listmania! Favourite Books of 2007, Part 6

Posted 15 December, 2007 in Favourite Books of 2007 |

Today’s list comes courtesy of Alex Good. Alex’s criticism has appeared in Quill & Quire, the Toronto Star, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere. He administers the literary website Good Reports.

Alex Good:

Here are my thoughts:

Not a bad year for Canadian books, as long as you stayed away from things like the Giller shortlist. Of course it’s impossible for one person to read more than a tiny percentage of what gets published any given year. But here are three worth mentioning.

Time’s Covenant, by Eric Ormsby. It says “Selected Poems” but it has pretty much everything by this major poet. An essential book.

Hitting the Charts, by Leon Rooke. An excellent selection of Rooke’s stories, showcasing his truly unique voice and vision. Together with the Ormsby these are two books that belong on every CanLit lover’s bookshelf.

The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland. Nobody’s been harder on Coupland over the years than I have, but I thought this was clever and funny and I really enjoyed it.

Since you open things up to books that aren’t new but were on my reading list anyway, I would also add Mark Ames’s Going Postal, which I thought was far-fetched in places but was the angriest political book I’ve read in a very long time, and Marian Engel’s Bear. I suppose I should have read Bear before this but I finally got around to it this year. And it was better than I expected. A bit obvious, but overall very well-handled.

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