Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

A master at his best. The day Winston Niles Rumfoord flew his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum was a bad day - he was converted into pure energy and only materializes back on Earth every 59 days, only for an hour. But he knows the future and the past, including that an alien on Titan is waiting for a spare part for his  spaceship and that his home planet is manipulating events on Earth in order to deliver that spare part.  An examination of free will, destiny, and the forces that control us.

Telegraph Avenue - Michael Chabon

A work from a master at the height of his powers, channeling Pynchon and mixing Melvin Van Peebles, 1970's kung-fu films and comic books, reaching down to find something deeper, more human, written with prose that makes you want to either never write a sentence again or quit your job, your relationships and all contact with the outside world and sit in a chair in your basement until you figure out how he did it. Two friends - one white, the other black - run a record shop in a neighbourhood that straddles Berkely and Oakland, a strip of land that has seen better days and is now threatened by a local boy made good, a former NFL quarterback who wants to re-vitalize the area by dropping a retail monolith into the middle.  It doesn't quite reach the level of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but the level it does reach is worth the read.

NW - Zadie Smith

A love letter to the place you grew up, the kind of love letter that itemizes all of your lover's faults and compares them to your own, but ends with an I love you anyway sentiment. Four people from the NW corner of London, linked together by space and history and secrets. Not as enjoyable as White Teeth, but still very good, even with the different narrative styles.

Swamplandia! - Karen Russell

Reading the jacket copy (OK - online copy) of this book turned me off - a story of a family of misfits told from the perspective for a precocious young girl. I relented eventually, though the fact that it was nominated along with The Pale King for the Pulitzer should have warned me off. (I'm a DFW fan, but The Pale King as a notebook that should have been left unpublished)

Swamplandia! starts off strong but gets murkier the more it goes along. Alternating between characters and perspective doesn't help, and there's a hollowness in the characters that echoes in the prose. The first-person accounts from Ava are so over the top with metaphor they are reminiscent of a undergrad creative writing workshop, while the third person chapters told from her brother's point of view skirt the edges of any real emotion.

A Hologram For The King - Dave Eggers

A middle-aged businessman finds himself in debt, in poor health (mental and physical) and in a tent in Saudi Arabia, waiting for the King to arrive so he can demo the hologram technology and win the IT contract for the city the King is building in the middle of the desert. He has a lump on his back that he is sure is going to kill him, and he's not sure how to pay for his daughter's university tuition. He's part of the old world, when the U.S. actually made things, and his life is an analogy of America over the last three decades. Eggers gets better with every book, and this one is his best yet.

Canada - Richard Ford

A series of bad decisions can ruin not only your life but the lives of people around you. Dell Parsons, the narrator in this very sad story, learns this first hand. He traces the first bad decision back to his mother deciding to marry his father, then building in a series until the ultimate bad decision that his father and mother make to rob a bank. He's taken to Canada to live with the brother of his mother's friend, a man that has made a series of bad choices that has left him hiding in a small town in Saskatchewan. Ford writes with the same level of mastery in Independence Day, and though Dell is no Frank Bascome, he's a man coping to his circumstances, most of which are beyond his control.

The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

When you're 12, it often feels as if the world is ending, that things are changing beyond your control. For the narrator of this tightly written story, it's true - the world slowly stops rotating, causing days and nights to last longer and people to go crazy. It's an end-of-the-world story without the usual trappings (roaming gangs, mass panic, survival against all odds). The ending had me wanting more, but there it's nicely written, with hardly an extra word.

Interworld - Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves

Intended originally as a TV script, this story moves quickly, told from the perspective of a regular teenager who discovers that alternate universe versions of himself are engaged in a battle between two warring forces over the fate of the universe. Perhaps a little too colloquial at times, it's nevertheless very entertaining.

The Man Who Knew Too Much - GK Chesterton

A look into the dark corners of upper-crust, pre-First World War British society, a place where hypocrisy and murder nestle nicely with tea and a stiff upper limit. The comparisons of the detective to Sherlock Holmes are apt (and perhaps intended) but Horne Fisher's deductions come from knowing what shadows lurk in men's souls and the moral implications weight more heavily on him than the resident of 221B Baker Street.

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

It builds to a point that never finally comes, ending with a whimper not a bang. Ambitious, yes, but its reach far exceeds its grasp, and the reader is left holding a long story with no satisfying conclusion. Not that you need a satisfying conclusion in all cases, but in this one there are too many loose threads. The three book structure (collected as one for North American readers) does the story no favours - most of the third volume could be (and should have been) cut and there's far too much time spent by the characters sitting around, waiting for something to happen.

Having read Murakami before I expected something bigger (not in word count but in concept) and there are different paths the story could have gone down that would have made it more satisfying. (There's that word again) Even a Sixth Sense switcheroo (as it's known in the literary world) would have been better, but perhaps that was the kind of event Murakami was trying to avoid. If so, he also avoided the chance to make something truly great. Not to bring a crass pop culture reference, but this book reminds too much of the last episode of Lost - starts out strong, creates a layer of suspense, but willingly fails to followup on all of its promise.

The Imperfectionists - Tom Rachman

A quirky, English-language newspaper in Rome is the spine that connects the stories in this novel, from the past-his-due date stringer who gives up the business to connect with his son to the workaholic editor who runs into an old lover and makes the mistake of asking what he really thinks about her. Good insight into the life of a paper, but the very human stories and all the things left unsaid make this an excellent read.

King John of Canada - Scott Gardiner

Less a novel than a Canadian political science major's fantasy, this novel tells of a wonderful future where peace and prosperity is brought about by Canada having a king. Not just any king, but King John, chosen randomly by a lottery. Lucky for Canada, because King John is smart, wise and able to get Quebec to secede from the Dominion, re-invigorate the Armed Forces and marry a beautiful Norwegian Princess. Told in a diary form by his loyal sidekick, it wastes too much time in the present as he details his exile in the frozen north.

A Visit From The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

Somewhere between a collection of linked short stories and a proper novel, this book details what time does to us (the goon squad). All of the characters are connected in some way, but it doesn't really matter that they are. Each chapter is it's own story, and each one ranges from satire to tragedy, from third to second person, and even a journal in PowerPoint form. It all holds together, a look at loss and aging and how we don't always get to be the person we want to be, we always end up becoming the person we are.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

What strikes a modern reader of this collection of adventures of the great detective is how many remain unresolved. In The Five Orange Pips, the suspects disappear in a ship sinking. In The Adventure of the Copper Breeches, the resolution is tied up neatly, without much intervention from Holmes. Unlike modern detective tales that are strewn with corpses, most of these cases don't have a body, but instead verge into the merely interesting or slightly perplexing. Still, it's a good read, and has the classic line: "It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke

In this book, the American Southwest is a broken wasteland, where rejects, killers and people with too much history hide out, hoping the past doesn't catch up. Sheriff Holland is a good man trying to make sense of the world around him as the bodies pile up when a former weapons maker for the CIA is kidnapped by former Mexican soldiers who worked for the US government. The man ends up in the care of a mass murderer who prefers to use a Tommy gun to mow his victims down. Part McCarthy, part Faulkner, the violence is punctuated by breathtaking descriptions of the landscape.

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

The Sisters Brothers move through a blood-soaked American West Coast, one shaded by McCarthy, a land where lives are cheap and death is quick. They were hired to kill a man, for reasons unknown, something that doesn't sit well with the younger brother and narrator, Eli, who wants us victims to be at least guilty of something. His older brother, Charlie, doesn't care as long as the money is good. This tenuous grasp of morality is one of Eli's saving graces, as his is bleak sense of humour and his desire to find true love.

Eli's voice is note-perfect and the language is wonderful, reminiscent of True Grit. The story moves, and the casualness of the violence makes it all the more shocking.

Vineland - Thomas Pynchon

It's 1984 in Vineland, a place in Northern California where refugees from the 60's have gone to flee the re-election of Ronald Regan's America. In Vineland television, drugs, rock'n'roll, mysticism, revolution and repression all meet. You can get your karma adjusted or join the ranks of the not quite dead, but you have to look out, because the DEA and the FBI and the state are all after you, for something you might have done or maybe will do.  But even the man has to deal with its own issues, such as budget cuts that leave you in arm's reach from your prey, standing on a ladder hanging from a helicopter when the call comes in. The plot is too complex to summarize, the characters too unique to encapsulate, but its a funny, weird, wonderful book. In a word, it's... Pynchonesque.

No Great Mischief - Alistair MacLeod

A generational family saga, rooted in a rural setting, alternating between the past and the present, nature playing a heavy role, the tension between Anglophones and Francophones,  all the necessary CanCon requirements - I usually stay away from books like this. I was surprised though - it wasn't all that bad. It's the story of the MacDonald's, a large family living on Cape Breton, told by one their sons, a successful orthodontist. The family is trapped in the past - the past of Cape Breton but also of Scotland, and the narrator takes us through the family history, filled with heartache and death. A few of the sentences sink like stones in a pond, but the prose keeps the story  moving along.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Zsuzsi Gartner

There's always been something sinister about Vancouver, something dark and disturbing underneath that sheen of natural beauty and high livability index scores.  Gartner taps into this weirdness in this collection of short stories. Houses disappear, taking people and dreams with them. Civilized, home-owning males takes a few steps back on  the evolutionary chart to deal with a interloper into their suburban enclave. Angels take possession of teens and homeless junkies get publicly funded plastic surgery to boost their self-esteem.

Under the hyper-acute prose, filled with tangled sentences and cultural references, beats a heart. A dark one perhaps, but one that you can identify.

Right as Rain - George Pelecanos

Visits some familiar places: the crack house, the neighbourhood run by the drug kingpin, the whorehouse, the P.I. office, complete with gun in the desk drawer, removed when things get serious. Builds to a smooth climax, but when I saw where it was going within the first 50 pages I was hoping for a twist, something to make it stand out from the rest, but it never came.