One Every Two Weeks: A 2016 Reading List

Tis the season to be jolly. Or at least it's the season to compile lists of one sort or another. Just lately the papers here in Hogtown have selected what they call the top 100 books of the year. Last Sunday I read through the New York Times's list of the most highly regarded 100. No doubt many of the books on those and other lists are worth your time and money. Some, it's equally certain, are a waste of both. Of course, that grave, infallible judge - time - will determine if the books thought to have merit today will still be considered worthy ten or twenty or fifty years from now.

I have no idea what history will do to these books, but here's a list of those I read or reread in 2016. Some I raced through and didn't want to put down; some I put down almost as soon as I picked them up. Which is which doesn't matter because our responses to books, like music or art or film or architecture and the rest are so personal, so wholly subjective that asserting Book A is better than Book B is fatuous.  

Here they are, in no particular order, listed by title and author:

The Scheme for Full Employment, Magnus Mills; Guided Tours of Hell, Francine Prose; Henry & June, Anaïs Nin; The Chalk Circle Man, Fred Vargas; The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process, Meredith Anne Skura; Stranglehold, Robert Rotenberg; Mount Pleasant, Don Gillmor; Davy the Punk, Bob Bossin; Shoot the Dog, Brad Smith; A Moment on the Edge 100 Years of Crime Stories by Women, Elizabeth George, editor; Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad; To Have and Have Another A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, Philip Greene; The White Hotel, D. M. Thomas; Terminal, Rosemary Aubert; Golden Earrings, Yolanda Foldes; The Massey Murder, Charlotte Gray; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; Strange Loyalties, William McIlvanney; The Secret History of MI6, Keith Jeffery; This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin; Kinky Friedman, Road Kill; Murder in Memoriam, Didier Daeninckx; Seeking Whom He May Devour, Fred Vargas; The High Window, Raymond Chandler; The Vanished Landscape A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries, Paul Johnson; Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster.

That's 26 listed - those that I remember, of course -- or a book every other week, on average. Not bad considering I also spent time reading the novel-length manuscripts of some Hogtown writer friends. Let's see how 2017 turns out.

  

A Criminal Lack of Crime Fiction

Over a pint or two yesterday I was chatting to some friends about transit in Hogtown. Then one of them mentioned a tunnel on the Yonge Line. Oh, I said, that's the Ellis Portal. And ever keen to show off, I explained that Ellis Portal is also the name of Rosemary Aubert's protagonist in her excellent mystery series that features a disgraced judge who, when we first meet him, is living in a shack in the Rosedale Ravine.

Then the talk turned from subways to fiction. One member of our gathering was set to start reading Hemingway's Farewell to Arms after finishing a biography of Neil Young - no, I can't see a connection, either. Another had high praise for John LeCarre. I weighed in with further kudos for Rosemary Aubert's books, and as I did it struck me that for a big city Toronto doesn't have much of a reputation for modern crime fiction.

Hugh Garner wrote mysteries featuring a Toronto cop called McDumont, and Eric Wright had a series built around another Hogtown policeman, Charlie Salter. Jack Batten is back this spring, after a long layoff, with Take Five, another entry featuring Crang, his one name only sleuth. Much newer to the crime writing scene are Robert Rotenberg, a criminal lawyer who's published three novels, and real Toronto constable Brent Pilkey, who's had one book published. That's it as far as I know. Of course, the great Howard Engel lives in Toronto but he sets his Benny Cooperman books in Grantham, Ont., or St. Catharines as it's commonly known.

Now compare that lineup with the cops, private eyes, crusading lawyers and amateur sleuths we find in other big cities - London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris. Hogtown is, or should be, a goldmine for a crime writer. We have guns, gangs and a serious drugs trade. There's the Italian mob, the Russian mob, and very likely other mobsters in the largest - or even the smallest - immigrant communities. What about the ethnic or religious animosities that immigrants and refugees bring here from the "old country"? Pick up any newspaper; it's not hard to find compelling evidence of corruption and financial chicanery at every turn.  

All of the elements necessary to write good crime fiction are being served up on a silver platter here in Hogtown, so why aren't Canadian writers taking a crack at it? They may not be interested. Fair enough. Or they may be labouring under the false impression that crime writing can't also be good literature (Hello there, Mr. Chandler). But perhaps it's something else: crime fiction (like other works of fiction) demands that those who write it acknowledge that their society has flaws, serious flaws; that there's as much violence and dishonesty (per head) among their fellow citizens as anywhere else. It's so much easier to pretend otherwise - like the city's need for more transit.

   

The Toronto Small Press Book Fair is upon us. Since you enquire it's Saturday June 19 from 11: 00 am to 5:00 pm at The Great Hall, 1087 Queen Street West. So far so good. After all, the TSPBF (an acronym that could double as a writer's sobriety test) has been around for years and will, I'm guessing, see off its imitators and detractors. But...but I can't shake the notion that some aspects of the Fair could be better. It needs a permanent home. Traipsing from the JCC to the Tranzac Club to the Reference Library to The Great Hall is no way to build its reputation among the yet-to-be-converted. I know circumstances - cost, availability, pointless G-8 summit meetings - will necessitate the occasional change of venue, but with such long lead times disruptions can be worked around.

And since the summer event is the more anticipated of the two TSPBFs (the other is in the fall) and its timing dovetails with Luminato, which has gone from 0 to 60 in no time flat, why not attach the Fair someway somehow to what has become a splashy arts affair. The profile and the media coverage of the TSPBF would soar - OK, go up some - and small presses may well discover another stream of new, enthusiastic readers which is, surely, the point of the Fair. I realize some elderly hippies will object to the vulgarity of such an idea, but so what? Let them read their work to each other and remain pure. Oh, and since we're being heretical, here's something else to ponder: it's time to dump arts & crafts and anything else at the Fair that's not strictly literary.

I Love the Toronto Public Libraries

Yes, it's true, I absolutely love TPL. But I'm beginning to think TPL doesn't love me back. Is waiting months for a copy of Obelisk, Neil Pearson's book about the groundbreaking Paris-based publisher of the early work of some of the great modernists - and reams of pornography some of them wrote - a sign that TPL doesn't care? Why won't TPL circulate such important-to-literary-history works as Samuel Putnam's Paris Was Our Mistress? Why can't I check out Lethbridge U prof Craig Monk's still new book on American writers of the Lost Generation? Why can't I get my hands on The Expatriates by Ishbel Ross unless I sit in the Reference Library and read it? Why can't I check out Ford Madox Ford's Return to Yesterday?

I understand that some books are just too valuable to place in circulation since, for one thing, it's unlikely they will be reprinted. But a book (Craig Monk's) from the U of Iowa Press published in 2008? Or what about British historian Simon Kitson's excellently reviewed The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France? It's just been published! But can't leave the Reference Library.

There are few things sadder than unrequited love. TPL, please don't break my heart.

WOTS this then?

I've always considered Word on the Street an event for the bookish, so I felt clammy dismay creeping up on me trawling through Eye Weekly's guide to this Sunday's festival. Surely there are other venues for a "Money Matters" tent and a "Cooks 'n' Books" stage pushing tomes about French recipes and cooking with beer. And of course, much of WOTS will be accompanied by tuneless and wholly unnecessary amplified dirges passed off as music.

I can only hope those of us who take the "word" seriously - like, y'know, fiction and lengthy, serious stuff in serious magazines - that Austin Clarke, Ray Robertson, Camilla Gibb and others will come to our rescue. We'll see.