Back in November, the chaps at The National Post asked me and a selection of eminently more qualified Canadian book types what we thought the most important publishing story of the past 10 years was. They ran the results at the weekend and the smart answers ranged from decline of literary magazines to the rise of Google.
I have to admit, I was at a bit of loss as to how answer the question. Decades are such arbitrary periods of time. I read somewhere that the 19th Century didn’t really end until 1914, and in a way I feel like the 21st Century didn’t really start until the day after 9/11 2001. And who is to say that epoch is over? So many things still look the same…
Of course I really have no idea what any of the last 10 years meant for books. I don’t have enough perspective. All I knew is that I wanted to say something positive (nobody likes a whiner) and avoid saying anything too obvious, boring or bullshitty (i.e. definitely no talk about either the “death of publishing” or “teh internetz”).
In the end I equivocated and then gushed about something close to my heart — comics:
“J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and online retailer Amazon dominated the decade, but they have their roots in the previous century (Amazon was founded in 1994, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997). George W. Bush surely has a claim — his crimes and misdemeanours created an industry within an industry and produced many fine books including The Dark Side by Jane Mayer and The Forever War by Dexter Filkins — but the very thought of the 43rd President of U.S. being the publishing story of the decade is simply too horrifying to contemplate seriously. Many people will no doubt say e-books, but I think they will be the story of the next decade. So I’m going to go with the popular success and the critical acceptance of long-form comics (the “graphic novel” if you must) as the big story. With the likes of Asterios Polyp, Black Hole, Bone, Epileptic, Fun Home, George Sprott, The Hunter, Jimmy Corrigan, Louis Riel, Paul Moves Out, Persepolis, Safe Area Gorazde, Scott Pilgrim, Skim and Shortcomings (not to mention the beautiful reprints of Peanuts and translations of Tezuka and Tatsumi) to name just a few, we really have had a wonderful decade.”
Perhaps, not the wisest thing I’ve ever written, but hey…
The Post also asked us to nominate our best books of the decade.
As I’ve said before, I’m really not terribly qualified (at least compared to some) to make a call on “best” (especially when it comes to Canadian literature), but I did strive to be more objective than I was with my personal list of the books of 2009, which meant leaving out eclectic favourites ranging from Stet and How To Be Alone at one end of the spectrum to Hellboy: Conqueror Worm and Hard Revolution at the other, with the likes of I’ll Go To Bed At Noon, Lush Life, Mother’s Milk and The Dark Room stuck somewhere in the middle. And that’s not to mention all the art and design books I chose to leave out: 79 Short Essays on Design, Penguin By Design, The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora, Charley Harper, to name just a few of the top of my head…
But with all those caveats firmly in place, here is my annotated and abridged list of the best books of the decade compiled for The Post:
Remainder by Tom McCarthy (Metronome 2005, subsequently published by Alma and Vintage)
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder was the first book I worked on at Raincoast Books — We briefly distributed the Alma Books hardcover before Vintage published their own paperback edition (pictured above, cover design by John Gall of course,with the most unlikely of blurbs from Jonathan Lethem) in the US and Canada — so it has a special place on my shelf. Oh and it’s really good.
Here’s what I wrote for The National Post:
“If only for a fleeting moment Remainder, a dark and spare novel about personal authenticity and murderous re-enactment, seemed to offer a creative alternative to the cul-de-sac of overwrought and twee novels emanating from Brooklyn (and creative writing classes everywhere). Sadly the bloated and banal seem to have made a decided comeback (if they ever went away), but even so, the unashamedly intellectual Remainder stands out, perfectly capturing the fears and anxieties of the decade.”
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (Random House 2000)
Possibly the polar opposite of Remainder, Chabon’s literary Boy’s Own adventure hit a lot of my buttons: Golden Age Comics, Eisner, Steranko, European folklore, New York, and WWII. Really, what’s not to like? But my affection for this book ebbs with every new effort — including Chabon’s own — to repeat the formula and turn pulp into something politely literary. (And NB the Picador paperback cover design above is by Henry Sene Yee — you can see his sketches here).
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Pantheon 2000)
Perhaps not my favourite graphic novel favourite of the decade (that slightly dubious honour would probably go to Tekkon Kinkreet — and although the English edition I own was published in 2007, the series itself is actually from the mid-90’s, so I didn’t think it qualified for this list), but Ware’s breakthrough graphic novel began the decade and went on to creatively define it for graphic novels. No Jimmy Corrigan, no McSweeney’s Issue 13.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf 2005)
Like Kavalier and Clay, Ishiguro’s quietly evocative SF novel justifiably appeared on a lot of other Best of the Decade lists. It’s just beautifully, beautifully written and has a silver sliver of ice at its heart.
The Dark Side by Jane Mayer (Doubleday 2008)
It’s almost impossible to think about books that are representative of the decade without including at least one on the Bush Presidency, 9/11 and the awful ‘war on terror’. The Dark Side could easily have been the aforementioned Forever War by Dexter Filkins, or Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, or Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, or one of the many other excellent books on these topics. But Mayer’s exposé of state-sanctioned torture chillingly underlines the bureaucratic banality of evil and the horror lived long in the mind after I finished reading it.
And, you know what? The Dark Side reminded me that books are important. They can and should be more than vehicles of self-promotion. Research — real research — requires more than Wikipedia. And — fuck it — we need to keep paying writers to write.
Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography by Chester Brown (D+Q 2003)
I suspect Louis Riel is now a creative and stylistic albatross for poor ol’ Chester Brown, but it was my joint first choice for the Canadian book the decade. This is what I wrote for The National Post:
“Not only is Louis Riel a uniquely Canadian story, it was published by Drawn + Quarterly (surely the most interesting Canadian publisher of the decade) and it epitomizes their success at unearthing and supporting creative talent. It isn’t a coincidence that Daniel Clowes—author of Ghost World and one the cartoonists of his generation—has decided to publish his new book with them.”
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (GP Putnam And Sons 2003)
Although Pattern Recognition did not receive good reviews when it was first published and I bought the hardcover out of a reminder bin, it was my other pick for Canadian book of the decade. The book’s obsession with the fringes of pop culture and the dislocation and horror of the globalized world seemed to me (in some small way) to make it the first novel genuinely about the 21st Century. Even if it dates horribly (which many critics seemed to think it would), I think it’s a something of a cult classic. This is what I said to The National Post:
“A prescient post-September 11th novel about viral media, [Pattern Recognition is] the antithesis of the clunking, insular, parochial Canadian novel so beloved of literary prizes. The book is not without its flaws – it was not well received by the critics when it was published in 2003 – but it just fizzes with ideas, oddness, and energy. I can’t think of another Canadian novel that I refer to quite as often in everyday conversation. Give me flawed and brilliant over dull and worthy any decade of the century.”
OK — I love Pattern Recognition and I do talk about it a lot — but I was being a bit of a shit disturber here (which is probably why The Post ignored it). That said, Pattern Recognition is better than several other books (that shall remain nameless) that did make the cut that’s for sure.
So, that’s my list. You can read the Post’s selections here. What did we miss out?
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