50 Books

Partly to check another one off the 101 list, and partly because I can’t think of another damn thing to write about, here is my top 50 books list. Let me reiterate that this is not a list of books that I think should be canonized or passed down to generations not yet imagined, it’s just the 50 books that I dig more than anything else I’ve read. I’ll list them in reverse order, for the sake of suspense. And don’t just scroll down to the bottom and blow the surprise: pre-emptive scrolling makes the baby Jesus cry.

50. East of Eden – Enjoyed this more than any other Steinbeck I’ve read. For the record, this was in my library long before Oprah claimed it.
49. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Read the book, watched the movie, and saw the play all in the space of about two weeks. I think I enjoyed the book most, but honestly they’ve all become one gelatinous piece of art to me. Might not deserve to be here, but hey, 50’s a lot of books, people.
48. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – If you ask me, Quidditch—which takes up about three hundred pages on this one—can suck it. But the last quarter of this book had me up into the wee hours. Best of the series.
47. Beloved – Did a presentation in a Contemporary American Lit course back in the day and knew this book backwards and forward. I’ve since forgotten everything, but I know that it deserves a spot of the list.
46. Skin – I entered the three-day novel writing contest twice in my life. My first attempt, while good, was beaten by an absolute piece of dogshit called Small Apartments; my second attempt was just an absolute piece of dogshit. Skin, by Bonnie Bowman, won the year before I entered, and it’s unbelievable. It involves an eczema-crippled porn star and a doctor with impractically large genitalia, and it’s so well written that it’s almost impossible that she put it together in just three days. I would have been more than gracious losing to this one. But I didn’t, so I’m not.
45. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – I put this on the list reluctantly. It’s about movie-making in the seventies, and while I did learn a great deal, it just tries too hard to be dishy. If I were to believe every word of this book, then every director at that time was megalomaniacal and high as a kite 24/7, and further, their wives were all dirty whores.
44. No Logo – Brilliant and scary. Raised my social consciousness for the first time since grade school.
43. The Stand – One of the only Stephen King epics that deserves its one thousand plus pages. When he killed off Nick, I’ve never felt so resentful towards an author. I’m still a little bitter.
42. Fifth Business – Enjoyed this more than any other book I studied in high school, including the craptastic Catcher in the Rye. Yeah, I said it.
41. The Elements of Style – This is the grammar and punctuation bible, put together by an old, condescending English professor, with a second half appended by the author of Charlotte’s Web. Surprisingly readable. I’m such a nerd.
40. The Blind Assassin – My favourite Atwood comes a little farther up the list, but from a sheer talent perspective this is as good as it gets. There are lengthy sci-fi sections in here that I’d say are the best of their kind that I’ve read. (Then came Oryx and Crake, which is all sci-fi and didn’t turn me on nearly as much.)
39. Middlesex – An epic about Greek immigrants, generations of incest, and a hermaphrodite. Coolio. Jeffrey Eugenides spent seven damn years on this novel, which I find unfathomable.
38. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Unlike the movie, this book has an ending. It’s not all just acid and space babies and more acid, people. Read the book!
37. Geek Love – The story of how Sarah fell in love with me? No, actually it’s about a couple who spawn a family of circus freaks through the mother’s liberal ingesting of insecticides and fun radioactive materials. Rock.
36. Flowers for Algernon – Heartbreaking. Sort of like the Lawnmower Man without all the fancy.
35. The Love of a Good Woman – I wanted to put some Alice Munro on here, and while I really didn’t give a crap about the titular story, there’s another one in there called "The Children Stay" that I think is her best work. And I also just wanted to use the word titular.
34. Porno – Sequel to Trainspotting, which you’ll see quite a bit further down. Renton, Sick Boy, and crew get into the world of amateur pornography. Good times.
33. The Corrections – Portrait of a super-dysfunctional family from Jonathon Franzen. Sometimes you can smell the blood and sweat that fell into a work of genius, but with his writing I get the (likely wrong) sense that it all comes very easy to him. He’s got one hand on the keyboard, half a sandwich in his mouth, and he’s conducting a phone interview and flipping off the image of Oprah on his TV set all at once.
32. The Power and the Glory – Another school text that doesn’t deserve the stigma.
31. The Call of the Wild/ White Fang – I put these together because they’re basically the same book, which is not to say that both aren’t good.
30. You Shall Know Our Velocity! – I had to have some Dave Eggers here because the guy is brilliant, not to mention entertaining as all get-out. And the best titler going these days. Other choice selections include “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly” and "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"
29. Watership Down – Yes, I am a ten year old girl, thanks for asking.
28. Shampoo Planet – I’m not sure if this book deserves such high placement because it was the first bit of Coupland I ever read. Was it this book in particular or discovering the author that made this so great? Haven’t read it since, but I’ll let you know. Going forward, we’ll call this ‘the Coupland phenomenon.’
27. Fahrenheit 451 – vastly superior to the first four hundred and fifty books in the bloated Fahrenheit series.
26. Brave New World – Begins stronger than it ends, but great regardless. I love books that depict a future dystopia, especially when they’re forty years old and you can forgive the vague science.
25. Lolita – I’ll be damned if this book didn’t have me rooting for a pedophile. Don’t judge. Try getting through the first fifty pages without hoping that poor Humbert Humbert just gets his girl.
24. Wonder Boys – Michael Chabon is the master of writing fiction that is both big-L Literary and pleasant to read. The book is superior to the movie, but the movie isn’t too shabby either.
23. Which Lie Did I Tell? – Screenwriting dirt from William Goldman. A bit of gossip, a bit of how-to. He was great once: Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Now he writes Schwarzenegger flicks and every Stephen King adaptation ever, poor bastard.
22. Not Wanted on the Voyage – Generally, Timothy Findley was a pretentious arse, but I loved this book. It’s a very different retelling of the Noah’s Ark story that the Religious Right probably weren’t too fond of.
21. The Gunslinger – I’ve gone on about this previously, so won’t again.
20. The Handmaid’s Tale – Again with the future dystopia. Best Atwood ever.
19. 1984 - Natch
18. Such a Long Journey – I read this book at a time where I was especially down on Canlit—where every Canadian book I read involved a farm, depression, alcoholism, incest, and absolutely no forward motion. Then along came Rohinton Mistry who restored my faith.
17. White Teeth – Zadie Smith published this book when she was twenty-four, and she is smarter and more talented then you or I will ever be. And by the way, it galls me.
16. Animal Farm – I know less then a goat does about the Russian Revolution and I still enjoyed the bejezus out of this book.
15. No Great Mischief – I had Alistair MacLeod as a teacher (not for writing, sadly) and I was also present at the launch of his book. Do you know how he writes? He doesn’t draft and redraft his work as a whole; he writes a sentence, and if he doesn’t like it he scratches it out and starts again, and again, and as many times as necessary until he’s happy with it, then he moves on. It took him fourteen years to write this book. Now you know why.
14. Fight Club – The central theme to pretty much any Chuck Palahniuk book is self-actualization through self destruction. It gets a touch tiresome after the fourth book or so, but he did it best the first time. The movie is superior, but the novel is still brilliant.
13. A Fine Balance – With the kind of fiction I read, the imaginary horrors and tragedies I voyeuristically enjoy, I sometime think that I have no soul. It’s very rare that I’m actually saddened or repulsed by a book or even a single scene. Only twice that I can remember have I ever had to put a book down because I couldn’t immediately go on. This was one of those instances. It involves a sterilization taken too far, and it was hell to read.
12. The Old Man and the Sea – Not a huge Hemingway fan, but how can you not like this? No machismo, no misogyny, just a broken old fisherman watching the catch of a lifetime get devoured by sharks. Perfect.
11. Barney’s Version – There’s probably not a lot of instances where an author writes their best novel at the end of their career, but this is surely one of them. I like Richler the shit-disturber more than Richler the satirist.
10. The Fire Dwellers – My love of Margaret Lawrence comes from the fact that her fiction isn’t so far from something I could write; not nearly as skilfully, of course, but just as far as the subject matter goes. Her books aren’t filled with war, or high intellectual discourse, or (I’ll say it again) future dystopias, they’re about housewives, and white trash folks, and marital affairs, and old people. And even though it’s about everyday going-to-church, watching-the-kids type stuff, it’s fascinating.
9. The Basketball Diaries – Jim Carroll was an absurdly smart kid. And even though it’s all about drugs and debauchery, it still made me feel deeply ashamed about how dull my life is.
8. Microserfs – Best Coupland there is, in my humble opinion. In some of his books I find the omnipresent quirkiness of his characters grating, but here they’re all programmers and it just fits. And you’ve got to admire the guy for writing about Microsoft well before anyone really gave a damn.
7. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs – I won’t say much about this because I think I’d like to do a whole entry on it sometime soon. It’s basically a book of essays on pop culture and philosophy, and that description sells it way short. Here’s an excerpt to make up for it: “For those of us who grew up in the media age, the only good silence is the kind described by the hair metal band Extreme. ‘More than words is all I ever needed you to show,’ explained Gary Cherone on the Pornograffiti album. ‘Then you wouldn't have to say that you love me, cause I'd already know.’ This is the difference between art and life: In art, not talking is never an extension of having nothing to say; not talking always means something.”
6. A Jest of God – Once upon a time I was writing a novel, and in the midst of it I read this book. It turned out that there were sections of A Jest of God that expressed exactly what I was trying to say. I found this to be equally inspirational and dispiriting.
5. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – Again with the Coupland phenomenon; I might think I like it so much because it was my first John Irving experience. This was the other book I had to put away for a bit, this time not because it was so sad, but because I’d never felt so present in a scene before. It was at the end of ‘The Finger’ section: I thought I was on the business end of that drill.
4. A Clockwork Orange – Once you figure out the language—drougues, moloko, razdraz and whatnot—you feel like you’re part of a secret club. This was another of those books that had me rooting for a really awful guy. Don’t beat poor Alex. He’s not that bad, really.
3. Life of Pi – This will sound awful, but one of my first thoughts while reading this was, “Yann Martel can’t be Canadian—this is too good.” The writing is brilliant, the story is entirely un-Canadian, and the ending… I wouldn’t dare spoil it. Go read it, and I don’t mean later.
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Far and away some of the best writing of the past five years. It’s an epic about the Golden Age of comic books, with golems, acts of escape, Nazis, and superheroes. I cannot imagine the time and the research put into this. If I could, I wound eat Michael Chabon’s brain.
1. Trainspotting – As has likely become clear by now, I love books about degenerates. I don’t want to see bad things happen to good people, but I love seeing lowlifes go through the ringer. This book is almost the culmination of every book I like. Like Clockwork Orange, it has its own secret club language (in this case, phonetic Scottish); like Lolita, it has you cheering for the bad guy (because pretty much everyone in this is a bad guy). I also love it because it’s so episodic; there are thirty-odd stories within the overall novel and they're so self-contained that you could read the damn thing backwards and still enjoy it.