The top 20 stories of 2007

Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard has constructed entire novels on the sticky bedrock of boyhood shame, but it’s in his stories that he most compellingly cores the male soul

Unmarketable by Anne Elizabeth Moore

I wanted to like Unmarketable, but although Moore has assembled the makings of a trenchant magazine article on cool-hunting and how big-budget PR firms co-opt small-scale artists to infiltrate urban youth, she’s not equipped to stay the course of a book

Black Monday: Conrad Black sentenced to 6.5 years

Hon. Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour - better know to the world as Conrad Black, the world's third most powerful press baron, according to Naomi Klein - is expected to receive sentencing today in a Chicago court.

The Last Wild Wolves by Ian McAllister

Ian McAllister’s deep love for the animals is palpable, and throughout the well-written account, we come to know and care for them

I Am America (And So Can You!) By Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert's I Am America is as hypnotic and hilarious as The Colbert Report

Gastroanomalies By James Lileks

Gastroanomalies: Questionable Culinary Creations From the Golden Age of American Cookery sticks to what James Lileks knows best: cooking gone terribly, terribly wrong

10 picture books for tree-bound tots

Bunnies, bigheads, broncos, and Bart fill the illustrated pages of this year's gift suggestions

City of Vancouver Book Award shortlist

Put on your yarmulke, here comes Hanukkah!

Adam Sandler sings his Hanukkah song.

Robert Pickton in depth

Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes by Terry Watada

Watada’s story rises above genre in its details of Depression-era life among first-generation Japanese Canadians

Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival

There won’t be swords at this year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, but there will be comic novelist Howard Jacobson (Kalooki Nights) coming all the way from England for an opening-night discussion with CBC broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) closing the fest. In between, look for readings and performances by—among others—culinary writer Norene Gilletz, former Mossad agent Michael Ross (in conversation with Vicki Gabereau), and photojournalist David Rubinger.

Gentlemen of the Road By Michael Chabon / Love Over Scotland By Alexander McCall

Chabon and McCall Smith, our modern-day Dickenses, inherit different strands of Dickens’s craft. Chabon’s work to date has been naturalistic, urban, New Yorker–y. Here, he explains in an afterword (but why does he feel the need?), "you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of my characters”¦were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure." Where Chabon is all thesauruses and Silk Road merchant maps, McCall Smith falls squarely into the Dickens mode of closely observed, deftly delivered character

How to talk about books you haven't read By Pierre Bayard

This leads, naturally, to questioning whether books contain any enduring content at all and, ultimately, to the most unsettling paradox: this book asks if books have any function at all. Bayard concludes they are merely the passageway leading passive readers to become active creators of meaning. In this, he quotes Oscar Wilde’s maxim, "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so."

Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker

What is Clive Barker thinking? His latest, the short horror novel Mister B. Gone, is so introspective, so filled with interruption and qualification and self-doubt and such, it’s never scary. Yet if it’s not scary, what is it?

Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes

In Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes sifts the half-century between World War II and the dissolution of the USSR to understand the hysteria that brought the supergiants (and the rest of us) to the brink of Armageddon. The result is a meticulously researched, compelling examination of the 20th century’s dread-wracked second half

YouTube Canada

The Book of Stanley by Todd Babiak

Protagonist Stanley Moss is at death's door as the novel opens, disappointed by but resigned to (how Canadian) his own demise. Then: "There was within him a pressure so great he thought his heart had stopped.”¦Everything he had learned about death was wrong. It was not easeful or romantic”¦"

The Best New Restaurants in Canada*

A teeny police cock-up

Gay at Hogwarts

The Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival

Profile: Carellin Brooks

New nonfiction from Carellin Brooks.

Profile: Alberto Manguel

New nonfiction from Massey Lecturer Alberto Manguel.

Kids books: For the little darlings, pages to gobble in glee

New fall book for kids.

Graphic novels: Drawing on magic, porn, angels, and death

Graphic Novels with and without words.

The Braindead Megaphone

Day

Word on the Street / Alberto Manguel

The Gum Thief: A Novel by Douglas Coupland

Soucouyant by David Chariandy

Ameen Merchant

First-time novelist Ameen Merchant is worried.

M.G. Vassanji

t's fitting M.G. Vassanji won his second Giller Prize for a novel called The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche

3 literary events to ink in

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

It doesn't get much more provocative than South Korean Young-Ha Kim's first translated work into English. In this brief, chilly novel, written in 1996, an unnamed narrator recounts a few of his more aesthetic encounters with clients who want to design their perfect suicide. Though the book's title reminds us that self-destruction can be seen as choice, the suggestion remains that until the narrator came along they hadn't perhaps realized they were seeking an exit strategy.

Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

Eclipse , like Twilight (2005) and New Moon (2006) before it, is about Bella, who moved to the tiny town of Forks, Washington, for the start of Grade 11.

Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival

Let's take a moment to plan, shall we?

Your Body Is Changing: Stories by Jack Pendarvis

These are just appetizers for the main event: the novella that gives the collection its name. They are amuse-gueules meant to give us Pendarvis's measure, which essentially falls into the McSweeney's school of thinking that everyone's a chump, and the more you think you're the exception, the chumpier you are.

The Dark River: A Novel by John Twelve Hawks

The Dark River, like The Traveler before it, pits current Traveler Gabriel Corrigan against his turncoat brother, Michael, as they battle for freedom, or human souls, or”¦well, you get the point. The plot is incidental (in fact, it strangely repeats the first book's) and characterization is shaky (watch out for weak men and strong women!), though there's lots of fight and flight.

Underdog

William Gibson

Think you know William Gibson, Vacouver speculative-fiction author, father of cyberpunk? He recently sat down with the Straight to discuss his new, ninth novel, Spook Country.

The World Without Us

Everything is connected. We know that, but even in talking about natural systems and ecology, connections are all around. At least, that's the impression you get from Alan Weisman's thought experiment The World Without Us.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (no spoiler review)

How to summarize the 600-page conclusion to a modern epic?

Jeffrey and Sloth

Pirates Don't Change Diapers

The summer of the Marco Polo

The Wright 3

Evil Genius