Past favourites

Just a few of the best books I've ever read

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Raymond Carver). This collection of short stories contains one called "Popular Mechanics", quite possibly the most skilled two pages I've ever read, and without a doubt the most unnerving.


• Heave (Christy Ann Conlin). As good a depiction of regular life in Nova Scotia as I've read. Conlin manages to avoid most (and I stress most) of the cliches that go along with NS novels, something Lynn Coady is often guilty of.


• Crime And Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky). The book is nearly the ordeal that Raskolnikoff endures.


• Everything Is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer). Translation has never been so funny.


• Beowulf (Seamus Heaney). Translation has never been so epic. Reading this book I felt very, very small and young.


• Dead Girls (Nancy Lee). It was extra-creepy that this book, which makes at least passing reference in each story to the disappeared prostitutes in Vancouver, was released at the same time that the bodies were found.


• Devil's Knot (Mara Leveritt). A cause celebre among celebrities and those who've read the book, this is the story of infanticide, discrimination and injustice.


• Blameless In Abaddon (James Morrow). Religious satire at its best: God's dead body is made into a Florida theme park before being hauled to The Hague to be put on trial for crimes against humanity. Oh, and it's narrated by the Devil. The middle part of a trilogy.


• Lamb (Christopher Moore). More religious satire. The missing years of Jesus (here known as Josh) and his best friend Biff. Hilarious.


• Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk). A rare case of a book not being as good as the movie that followed it, but (for me, anyway) a reality-altering book nonetheless.


• Nobrow (John Seabrook). If you liked No Logo you'll probably like this book. It's about a tier of marketing that's neither highbrow nor lowbrow: nobrow. But marketers have even learned to target an absence of discernable type, if we're to believe Seabrook. And I did.


• The Grapes Of Wrath (John Steinbeck). Steinbeck: the depression-era Dostoyevsky.


• America: The Book (Jon Stewart). Skewers American politics, politicians, news and citizens, all in a brilliantly funny package. Jon Stewart is the funniest man in America today, and sadly the best news man as well.