BookThug’s Best Reads of 2015, The Authors’ Edition

With 2015 soon coming to a close, and “best of” book lists appearing everywhere, it’s no surprise that we’re looking back on our favourite reads of the year. As per BookThug tradition, we asked a group of BookThug authors to share the Top 5 books they read this year. Samuel Andreyev, Pearl Pirie, Kate Hargreaves, Jean Marc Ah-Sen and Josh Massey kindly provided us with their picks for 2015. 

Samuel Andreyev, author of The Relativistic Empire

Isidore Ducasse by Jean-Jacques Lefrère (Fayard, 1998) 
Samuel Andreyev: This is a comprehensive biography of Isidore Ducasse, better known as le Comte de Lautréamont. Relatively comprehensive, that is, given that what is known about Ducasse’s life could be summed up in a few paragraphs. The author is forced to write around Ducasse rather than about him—describing, in fascinating detail, Ducasse’s milieu, the people he know, and the circumstances in which he lived.

The Writings of Robert Motherwell (University of California Press, 2007)
SA: Robert Motherwell is probably my least-favourite of the major Abstract Expressionist painters, partly because of his extreme productivity which often makes it difficult to separate out the truly essential work from the everyday. Yet he writes like an angel, and this volume contains vivid accounts of the most burning questions in art during the period in which he lived and worked.

Claude Vivier: A Composer’s Life by Bob Gilmore (University of Rochester Press, 2014)
SA: Biographies of living (or recently deceased) composers are extremely rare, and good ones could be counted on the fingers of one hand. This is assuredly one of them. Québecois composer Claude Vivier had a tragic life—an orphan, he died in sordid circumstances in Paris, in 1983—but wrote some incredibly beautiful music which has transcended the limited Canadian scene and become somewhat of an international phenomenon.

Les amours jaunes by Tristan Corbière (La Pléiade, 1973)
SA: Like Isidore Ducasse, Breton poet Tristan Corbière lived through the Paris Commune and published only one major work in his lifetime, a sarcastic, bitter collection of verse which does the near-impossible: combining the most journalistic informality and looseness of tone with the most exquisite technical perfection. One gets a sense of the extreme harshness of life in 1860s France, filtered through an amazing erudition. I’ve been reading it compulsively.

Tristan Tzara by Elmer Peterson (Rutgers University Press, 1971)
SA: This is actually a very mediocre literary study of Tristan Tzara by a virtually unknown scholar. It was given to me over 15 years ago and has sat on my shelf ever since, as I was certain that I would eventually read it. When I finally did, over the summer, I was instantly fascinated (again) by Tzara, whose personality rages across the decades, untamed even by this very tame volume.

❧

Pearl Pirie, author of the pet radish, shrunken

Spiders: Learning to Love Them by Lynne Kelly (Allen & Unwin, 2009)
Pearl Pirie: So, things were getting absurd. She woke screaming with nightmares of spiders. Well, that had to stop so she researched arachnophobes and invertebrate specialists worldwide. She overshot her aim of exposure therapy and became an field observer herself like Anne Rasa or Jane Goodall of the smalls. You are never more than a meter away from a spider but us huge clunking predators make them hide. Like Virginia Morell in Animal Wise mentioned, we observe better when an individual has a name. So she named and observed how some litter-mates are bold, others retreating, how where an orb-weaver builds changes shape and design and placement based on where it gets disturbed. Did you know there are 6 kinds of spider silk made?

Clean Sails by Gustave Morin (New Star Books, 2015)
PP: Excuses. Don’t need no professional quality acrylics to render a clear thought. Given sand, duct tape, or typewriter and the mind which is devoted to expressing, pushes any means to the necessary degree. It is not the tool but the mind behind it. Playful, meticulous, and sober and with more commentary on politics than most verbal poetry dares or cares to do with minimalist “violence as ornament”. Eye-dazzle, yes, but not decorative and pleasant and easy as some poetry, nor arbitrarily shutting the reader out either.

Their Biography: an organism of relationships by Kevin McPherson Eckhoff (BookThug, 2015)
PP: We are bound to our forms and lined pages and parallel typed ideas with their associated propriety dibs until we forget our cage is there. As if from the lineage of Kenneth Patchen’s Hallelujah Anyway, their biography blows the doors off what is Done. It isn’t A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid but it is another thing enacting a message thru its form. Some hand-drawn, some puzzle, some anecdote, self is other including other species, other is one with all. It is not about Connection exactly but connection, and valuing play.

What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012)
PP: While news is busy painting all not-human as monolithic green, people are actually learning things that have been being explored for centuries. How do plants perceive space, light, colour, movement? When do which cells communicate which way is up? How do messages go thru cell walls? While a lot of poetry is what next, this is the rest of the 5Ws.

Hungry Ghosts by Peggy Blair (Simon and Schuster, 2015)
PP: Hooked forward and yet elegantly poetically put together as Alden Nolan, the book runs in two parallel plots of detectives investigating murdered women in Cuba and in Northern Ontario, it has a native man returning to his birth community as a police detective, and has a feeling of being on the rough side of Cuba with its grey economy and people living as they must around rules when the rules don’t work. Through fiction more can be understood than in a report and yet the book is suspenseful and doesn’t feel didactic. Closing the book there’s a disorientation like getting off a plane, of expecting to see in a few steps again the homes we were just in.

❧

Kate Hargreaves, author of Leak

Josh Massey, author of The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree

The Bastard of Fort Stikine: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Murder of John Mcloughlin, Jr by Debra Komar (Goose Lane Editions, 2015)
Josh Massey: This book details a tale of mutiny and murder in a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost using forensic anthropology, written by Debra Komar. She’s great at detailing with incisive humour the savagery of the early settler mentality by analyzing correspondence and other historical records.

 

The Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles (Mariner, 2002)
JM: Chosen for its hugely intense drama and the depiction of early European ritual to communicate with and appease pantheon, raging superstitions.

Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture by Donald Keene (Kodansha International, 1978)
JM: This is a 1971 long-range look at Japanese creations written in an academically clean and erudite style.

The Reprisal: A Novel by Laudomia Bonanni (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
JM: Written through the  mid to late 1900s by Italian writer Laudomia Bonanni, this title was chosen for its drama as well—a pregnant woman awaiting execution by Italian fascists wields her fierce wit against her captors.

A Poetics by Charles Bernstein (Harvard University Press, 1992)
I found therein many eloquent and succinct presentations of ideas, a theory of disjuncture and plurality and open-mindedness to form and experimentation that moved that thing forward in its time and still seems to measure the pulse of our current creative challenges.