FAMILY MAN by Calvin Trillin (1998)

I am on my Trillin tear trying to pick up copies of as many of his 20+ books as I can lay my hands on. FAMILY MAN is a series of vignettes ranging from pre-kid days with Alice and Calvin on their own to the early childhoods of daughters Abigail and Sarah to the post-graduate days of those same girls.

Trillin is equal parts honesty, charm and humour. Reading FAMILY MAN will make you long for such a reconstructed history even if it didn't happen to you in the first place.

THE GUN SELLER by Hugh Laurie (1996)

I'm a rabid fan of Hugh Laurie's acting...Jeeves and Wooster with fellow Cambridge-educated smartypants Stephen Fry...husband to Imelda Staunton in PETER'S FRIENDS, father to the mouse voiced by Michael J. Fox in STUART LITTLE and the curmudgeonly eponymous physician on HOUSE.

This murder mystery showcases Laurie's naughty wit, though the plot drags on and the witticisms are at times a little precious.

Stephen Fry is a better writer. Pick up one of his books instead. Maybe MAKING HISTORY or THE HIPPOPOTAMUS or THE STAR'S TENNIS BALLS--a contemporary re-telling of Webster's play THE DUCHESS OF MALFI.

MORAL DISORDER by Margaret Atwood (2006)

I haven't read a new collection or novel by Atwood in a few years, and I was delighted by this most recent collection of linked short fiction. These stories chronicle a family's history, in a similar way to Alice Munro's fictionalized version of her own lore in THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK. But, there is something about Atwood's storytelling that enables me to identify myself and my own relatives in its midst.

Was Atwood never at the top of her game?

CONSUMPTION by Kevin Patterson (2006)

I've been wanting to read this novel since I first saw the gorgeous cover photo of a woman model posing with the skull of a caribou where her own face ought to be.

This book, rooted in the far north, transports you along with the protagonist Victoria to the south where she is treated for TB and then back to her community where she continues to be a stranger, even to her family. Victoria marries as "kablunauk", a southerner named Robertson who does his best to accommodate the native ways.

Sorrow follows Victoria throughout her life with the loss of two children, the violent and unresolved murder of her husband and her increasing distance from the land on which she was raised with abiding love.

Consumed as he is with the rhythms of the north, Kevin Patterson manages to weave a compelling tale about family, love, loss and healing.

FROM HARVEY RIVER by Lorna Goodison (2007)

Goodison's memoir of her mother and her mother's people is rooted in place in Jamaica. Doris Harvey is one of the illustrious Harvey girls raised by the river that sustained them and named after their immigrant forefathers. She is the shy daughter to Margaret and David Harvey who captures the attentions of Marcus Goodison, a handsome young man who makes a weeky pilgrimmage to get to know her and to ask for her hand in marriage.

Woven with Jamaican Creole aphorisms and song and the Irish temper and wisdom of Margaret's white father George O'Brian Wilson, FROM HARVEY RIVER is a rich cultural tapestry.

When fortunes change and Doris and Marcus must start a life over in Kingston, it is back to Harvey River that Doris's imagination wanders for solace and belonging as she raises her nine children in a new reality.

A SPOT OF BOTHER by Mark Haddon (2006)

The recently retired George is looking forward to building a little studio at the back of his garden where he plans to sketch and paint. His daughter Katie announces that she is going to marry Ray, a man that both George and her mother Jean think inappropiate. Katie's brother Jamie is also unsure of Ray's suitability but sees that he loves Katie and her son Jacob.

George discovers a lesion on his hip that sends him for a loop. Katie calls off her wedding and Jamie breaks up with his boyfriend Tony. The only member of the family even remotely happy is Jean who is blissfully and furtively carrying on an affair with David, a former colleague of her husband.

Their world falls apart and the centre does not hold as the Halls try to stumble their way to healing.

ABOUT ALICE by Calvin Trillin (2006)

Calvin Trillin is a long-serving staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of 20+ books of fiction and non-fiction. ABOUT ALICE is a gem of a memoir where he reveals the true Alice, the woman he fell in love with and was lucky enough to be married to for almost forty years. Rife with Trillin's trademark witticisms and his keen observations about the dignity of human life, ABOUT ALICE will make you smile from cover to cover.

WOMEN WITH MEN by Richard Ford (1997)

There are three long stories--moreso novellas-- in this collection. Ford contemplates the complexities of passionate relationships and meditates on the affect of place in setting the tone. He writes convincingly from both male and female perspectives with uncanny sympathy.

LUCKY GIRLS by Nell Freudenberger (2003)

I picked this collection of stories up from a remainder table while waiting for a film to start. It's Freudenberger's first book and reflects personal experiences she had living as a white woman in India and south-east Asia. Each story finds an outsider protagonist more at home away from home. Her style reminds me of Richard Ford's writing: spare, muscular prose. Both writers explore the contemporary human condition and are especially atuned to the nuances in intimate relationships between men and women.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion (2005)

Didion's national book award-winning memoir is as arresting on its third reading as it was during its first. It will become one of the books that I re-read annually to try to absorb her masterful and direct style. Grief makes all of us both less and more than we were before.

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK by Alice Munro (2006)

I've been a fan of Munro's style since I first read LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN twenty years ago. Her latest, and she claims her last, collection is her most personal. Blending memoir and fiction in these intergenerational stories. Regretably, I found the first section rather dull, but the remaining stories are independently luminous gems. I refuse to believe that this is Munro's last book.

THE GIRLS by Lori Lansens (2005)

During a particularly ferocious tornado in 1974 twins Ruby and Rose Darlen are born in a small town in southwestern Ontario. The girls are a fascination for both the town locals and travellers from abroad because they are not only identical, but also joined at the side of their heads by a patch the size of your palm.

As they approach their unexpected 30th birthday, Rose decides to write her autobiography. What emerges is a story of remarkable love and compassion; a story of true belonging.

Go out and get yourself a copy of this accomplished and human tale. It will make your heart swell.

THE ROMANTIC by Barbara Gowdy (2003)

Louise Kirk is no stranger to love and loss. When she is nine years old, her mother disappears and leaves simply a note attached to the fridge for Louise and her father which reads only "Louise knows how to work the washing machine." Shortly thereafter the Richters move into the house across the street.

Louise has fantasies about being adopted by them as a daughter just as they have chosen their adoptive son Abel(ard), her new best friend. Though geography intervenes and necessarily defines their relationship for several years, Louise can never manage to move beyond her longstanding love for Abel.

THE ROMANTIC addresses the complicated multi-faceted forms of love in haunting ways.

SUMMER CROSSING by Truman Capote (2004)

Published posthumously by the Capote Trust during the flurry of attention because of the two Hollywood films CAPOTE and INFAMOUS, SUMMER CROSSING is a frothy early manuscript that evokes privileged life in Manhattan in the 1940s.

Seventeen-year-old Grady begs off the summer crossing with her parents to their summer home in France and remains in their upper east side luxury apartment occasionally dining with her long-time friend Peter, but more frequently arranging assignations with her current unsuitable object of affection Clyde who manages a parking lot.

What begins as a light-hearted, whimsical tale of indulgence takes a sharp turn when Grady finds herself pregnant and she careens way off track.

Stylistic seeds are planted for Capote's much-loved BREAKFAST AT TIFFANIES and ground-breaking IN COLD BLOOD.

CUTTY, ONE ROCK: LOW CHARACTERS AND STRANGE PLACES, GENTLY EXPLAINED by August Kleinzahler (2004)

In this creative non-fiction collection, the Griffin Poetry Prize winner (for THE STRANGE HOURS TRAVELERS KEEP) ruminates about the scope of his life: growing up in a New Jersey neighborhood where he was surrounded by gangsters and raised by his family dog; his love affair with public transit; his friendship with Beat-god Allan Ginsberg; his penchant for mid-afternoon boozing; his loathing of Garrison Keillor's homespun stories and penchant for reading bad poetry on air nationwide; and, his respect for his gay older brother who commits suicide--a complicated man whom he misses.

As one of the blurbs on the back of this memoir attests, "this is a beautiful book-- mournful, swaggering, bleak, hilarious-- full of piercing and often loving assessments of life and art." What moved me most was the title piece about Kleinzahler's doomed and big-hearted brother, which reminded me of my own brother who died young in 1994.

Eerily, I find myself in Kleinzahler's description of his own teenaged self and how he related to his only brother as I did mine: "I couldn't have made for very thrilling company. But he always acted glad to see me...'You'll be all right,' he'd say smiling. 'Let's go out and see if we can't find ourselves a drink.' I miss having someone like that in my life. I miss it like a limb."

Kleinzahler's prose is tough, unflinchingly honest and gut-wrenching.

A must read.

CROSS BONES by Kathy Reichs (2005)

When a forensic pathologist becomes involved in the autopsy of an Orthodox Jew, her work life becomes unexpectedly thrilling. Someone thrusts a photo of a skeleton her way and cryptically claims it is the reason that the recently deceased has been murdered. Temperance follows the trail, with the help of Detective Andy Ryan, first to a monestary outside Montreal where she is given a bag of illustrious human remains and then across the ocean to Israel where a former colleague is excavating the site of what he believes to be the Jesus family tomb. There Temperance remarkably finds a shroud with bones and life becomes all the more adrenhaline-pumping exciting.

More of a page turner than THE DA VINCI code, and rife with historical conjecture and Biblical allusion, CROSS BONES will certainly have you questioning its plausibility. It's worth the ride, especially with the controversial evidence of the James (brother of Jesus) ossuary that even made a pit stop here in Toronto at the ROM a few years ago.

CAN YOU SPELL REVOLUTION? by Matt Beam (2006)

In this YA novel set in rural Ontario, Clouds McFadden is the new kid in town who greets his fellow eighth graders with the atypical, "Good morning, proletarians." Clouds has great plans to reform what he regards as the tyrannical rule of the teachers in his school and their principal, "the Penguin."

Caught up in repeating history, Clouds's good intentions become warped and his friends have to figure out a way to save him from himself.

UNTOLD STORIES by Alan Bennett (2005)

The esteemed British playwright has published a collection of non-fiction which includes thoughts about art, architecture, life in the theatre and his personal diaries between 1996-2004. I was most interested in the section about THE HISTORY BOYS, his award-winning play that set a record for Tonys on Broadway this past season, and which is currently on the big screen in theatres across the country with the same compelling ensemble cast I saw at the Broadhurst Theatre in July.

I was surprised by Bennett's stoic approach to the news of colon cancer and his positive attitude that comes out of that recent experience where he is relieved that he can afford private health care and move to the front of the line but equally disappointed in himself that as a socialist he chose to leap the queue.

His refusal to accept both a CBE (under Thatcher) and later a knighthood (under Blair) is curiously Woolf-like in its resolution to refuse gifts from strangers. He claims he couldn't possibly accept either because he couldn't come up with a suitable joke.

DEAD SIMPLE by Peter James (2005)

If you are even mildly claustrophobic, don't read this thriller. As part laugh and part retributive justice for previous pranks pulled, groom-to-be Michael is taken to a series of pubs by his mates and then buried alive in a coffin. The prank unexpectedly takes a turn for the worse when those very mates are killed in a car crash and no surviving friend is able to help Detective Inspector Roy Grace find the missing Michael.

This is a creepy novel with many plot twists. It is certainly not for the faint of heart.

TEACHER MAN by Frank McCourt (2005)

Chronicling his thirty years as a teacher in the NYC public high school system, McCourt unflinchingly portrays both the daily joy and frustration of being in the classroom on display and at the mercy of a roomful of adolescents who find teachers often boring and sometimes curious.

That we are all writers with stories to tell is what matters most. And the gift of trust which is occasionally exchanged in the classroom keeps us hooked on that learning curve.