Once upon a time, several years ago I dated a guy who liked to write. One late night, to stave off boredom we started writing a story back and forth. Today I found that folded up genius in one of my shoe box memory collections. You’re welcome.

T – Awesomeness; a profound word that can mean so many things. To Bird it meant being awesome—at all times and whatever the cost. Bird was being awesome right now, sitting at the helm of the spaceship.

L – Captain Bird, he corrected himself as he glanced quickly at the control board. He was Captain Bird, now. He was the moment he had woke up that day, head pounding, empty bottle of the galaxy’s strongest tequila at his feet. And whose fucking spaceship was this anyway? Bird rubbed his temples. This would be Brown’s fault, as per usual.

T – If only Admiral Brown hadn’t been so goddamn awesome, Bird wouldn’t have ended up in this mess. “I shouldn’t always be trying to top that fool!” Captain Bird thought to himself, pushing down the bile that rose in his throat, which tasted like last night’s intergalactic tequila. Only a week ago Admiral Brown had gone rogue, pulling half of the fleet with him when he decided to desert. His escape had been daring and genius. It had left Bird’s own ship disabled, and forced him into this interstellar trash heap. Bird cursed Brown one more time under his breath, and set out from the port.

L – “The night must have been a rager,” thought Bird as he examined his clothing. The thing about the intergalactic space fleet was how elite the recruiting practice was. In order to have gotten into the uniform he was in now he would’ve had to either outwit or kill an intergalactic captain and take his position, there was no other way for a lowly space janitor like him to have got here. Course, now that he was… Bird straightened his gleaming badge on his chest and picked up the captain’s hat he had spotted on the floor, placing it on his head at a jaunty angle. The memories of last night were beginning to come back to him. He had been having his usual nightcap at the local bar, bit seedy, but they knew him there. Everything had been going good, he was even pulling this mildly attractive Venetian when that fucking Brown had waltzed in like he owned the place, bragging loudly about taking over the fleet like a right douche. It had been years since they’d last seen each other but Brown still hadn’t figured out a way to reattach his mangled eye. Bird chuckled. It all went south when he made that pirate comment. Brown always was a bit touchy about his patch. Still sore, too, that Bird had bested him in that last fight, exiling Brown to the outskirts of the universe. “I guess he figured out how to breathe without air after all!” thought Bird as he engaged the ship’s light speed accelerators. What he wouldn’t give to kick Brown out a space hatch one more time—flailing like a wounded pigeon.

T – Brown awoke with a start, throwing the naked mildly attractive Venetian off his body and scanned the floor for his clothes. He pulled them on quickly, immensely happy to not be pulling on an imperial uniform. Brown had never been one for a uniform, his vagabondish spirit wouldn’t allow it. Dressed he pulled his eye patch over his head, covering his once useless eye. A surgeon on Nebula 452 had fixed it years ago, but Brown had grown accustomed to the patch—it suited his pirate image, and the ladies told him it was dashing. He had seen Bird last night. It had been years since Brown had laid eyes on that scum. The former janitor had rose high in the Starfleet ranks, it seemed that Brown would probably have to deal with Bird again in the near future. He relished the opportunity. Today however; he had more important issues on his mind—a cargo hold full of spice needed to make it to Napkin before the setting of the fourth sun.

L – Brown waddled over to the round mirror on the wall to admire himself. He grinned. Though, it was true, he had let himself go, he still looked damn good as far as he was concerned. Brown grabbed hold of his ample belly and lifted it up, giving the illusion of a much fitter man. Yeah, he looked good, alright. He flexed one flabby arm at the mirror and kissed the mound where his bicep used to be. Dead sexy, really. Brown glared as he remembered Bird’s taunts of “fatty fat pirate poo.” Not fat, he told himself, big boned. It only proved to irritate him further that Bird had only gotten better looking over the years. Shake it off, he told himself, looking over at the Venetian and shuddering. She was a long way from moderately good looking now, it seemed she got lost somewhere between horrendous and deformed. Bird had surely dodged a bullet there.

T – Bird heard a sound behind his head, this ship was really falling apart. His obsession with catching Brown had led to a more lax outlook on his personal safety. It was to be his undoing. He never noticed the small package that one of Brown’s innumerable spies had planted on his ship. Just as Brown’s majestic ship took off into the air, a beep signified the end of Bird. He didn’t even have time to scream as the ion bomb detonated, vaporizing Bird and everything he had ever stood for. Brown’s ship proceeded through the now empty space where Bird’s ship had just been, and leisurely made the jump to light speed.

In high school I did a project with a friend, crafting Albert Einstein’s head from clay on the base of lamp so that when you plugged it in and turned it on his ideas would just be trapped there. I spent an inordinate amount of time getting his nose and cotton ball wisps of hair just right. My friend just let me.

The day of the presentation I sweat through the papers in my hand and couldn’t stop shaking. I swallowed my words and kept my eyes on my feet. My friend cracked jokes that made the whole class laugh and when the teacher handed back our grades and mine was much lower, I walked out.

In grade ten, when I ditched my glasses and made the transformation from geeky sidekick to leading lady, I promised myself that from now on, that’s who I would be—the girl that does less work but makes an impression, but it never materialized. I still put in the hours. I still toil behind the scenes. And I’m still the one that takes the cuts, gets the bad news meetings.

Here’s the part where I end on an optimistic high note.

I review Love Water Memory over at The Coast: “Jennie Shortridge’s fifth novel takes pains to find sure footing but seems to stumble its way towards a climax. The characters are less well-rounded or real as they are sketches for a made-for-TV movie. Still, there’s something in a light read that strives for depth, not quite catching it. If you like your traumatic back stories as more of a footnote or are a fan of Nicholas Sparks, then it might be for you. Save this one for hotter days and sandy beaches.”

Another season of Girls ends and the last scene, as Hannah is rescued by her awful mistake of an ex-boyfriend instead of any one of her closest friends bubbles up in me such a raw desolation that I can’t stop sobbing, long after the credits roll. It’s because they all seem so broken and I see myself in all of their selfishness and most of their mistakes but they’re still girls, and I’m almost 28. When do you stop having an excuse for not having it together?

I stay up way too late and think about rekindling friendships long faded, making apologies for why things ended, if I can even remember. Maybe I was too idealistic in how I thought a friend should be. Maybe I could be more forgiving.

Friends Like Us seemed like the perfect read to match my mood. And it is but it isn’t because here’s two best friends that live in their own bubble, mistaken for sisters, a language all their own—it captures perfectly that ease, the support and adoration when you’re just so smitten with a friend that the years before you knew them are almost defined by that. Before careers, schedules and relationships seem to get in the way. Before like in Girls, we start turning to others for help. Why wasn’t it Marnie, Hannah’s oldest friend, that ran to her that night? Was there too much said between them? Too many disappointments? Have they just drifted too far apart? At what point does a friendship start to erode in on itself and can you catch it, fix it, send it back on track? Or is it a kind of inevitable motion, like falling, that you just have to let play out? Set it free and if it comes back to you, yadda yadda yadda. I know now that sometimes they do.

In Friends Like Us you start out at the end, an awkward run-in for Willa and Jane, years after whatever breaks them apart has done its damage and the dust has had time to settle but they don’t rekindle anything. They say the things they’ve been harbouring for years and then they go back to their respective and very separate lives. The rest of the book is what leads up to that inevitable end. It’s depressing but captivating. All the characters are fully formed and nuanced. It’s playful, funny, but sad too, and it’s so full of longing that it’s pretty heartbreaking to get to the end and know that some friendships can’t withstand the things we submit them to. That we can mess everything up but not love a person any less. That no amount of years going by will stop you from replaying conversations, remaking moves, and wondering wondering wondering how you could have done things differently. Maybe that’s just a risk you take when you love anyone, only you expect romantic relationships to end and to ultimately get over them… but there’s no guidebook on how to get over a friend.

We take little pills and make little pay cheques and try to be the best possible versions of ourselves and then one day all we leave are words behind.

Anyway, one of such books I read over the holidays was Wise Men by Stuart Nadler. I can already assume this will be a contender for my favourite book of the year. The son of a lawyer, Hilly Wise, is caught up in a life he doesn’t recognize when his father wins a big negligence case against an airline. Part of the nouveau riche in Cape Cod in the early ’50s Hilly meets and falls in love with a young African American girl, Savannah, at a time when their relationship only finds obstacle after obstacle, not the least among them, his overtly racist father. The summer they spend together changes him and the rest of the book chronicles how one season carries through and touches the rest of his life. Stuart Nadler is pretty fantastic. I wasn’t especially excited to read this book but from the first couple pages, I was completely drawn in. It’s not that any of the characters are particularly likeable, actually, most of them are maddening—but to watch them each circling their own drain is immensely satisfying.

Nadler isn’t heavy handed with serious themes, they take a back seat to character development—people who you might love then hate, but at the very least, constantly surprise you.

This week was the Critics’ Picks issue of The Coast which means I had to compile my Top 12 of 2012 books of the year list and happily this year (maybe unlike last year, shhhh) I had read so many books (68 and counting) that all the books on my list were both published this year and rated well by me on Goodreads. In the next couple of days I’m going to post a companion list to this one featuring my list of the year just in general, new and old, the best books I’ve read this year. I’m curious to see how different they would be.

My Top 12 of 2012 (books published this year)

12. The Child Who (Penguin)
By Simon Lelic

A somewhat bumbling provincial attorney Leo Curtice is saddled with the task of defending a 12-year-old boy after he molests and murders an 11-year-old girl. Drawn into the boy’s past and seemingly inability to understand the significance of his actions, Leo finds himself not just the only person willing to even consider defending the child but also, maybe, his only friend. It’s disturbing novel, not just for the boy but how he’s perceived in a system that pretends to withhold judgement until proven guilty. It’s horrifying to consider at what point a child stops being a child and turns into a monster—and scarier still what you can lose if you defend that monster. I’m not a huge crime fan, but this one was hard to put down.

11. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Harper Collins)
By Robin Sloan

I wrote about this one just the other day. Sloan’s novel about a life-lost guy who finds himself working at a strange bookstore that turns out to be a kind of front for a secret society’s quest for the secret of immortality is swiftly engaging and fun. Even if it doesn’t turn out how you (or the characters) necessarily want it to, it still manages to share a few life secrets with you, regardless. Maybe I’m biased because a literary-based mystery is just too appealing, but then again I never really fell for The Davinci Code, so I think I’m doing alright.

10. Dare Me: A Novel (Reagan Arthur)
By Megan Abbott

After reading The End of Everything and being totally unable to shake it, I had to read Megan Abbott’s newest novel and see if it was just a one-off. Dare Me is focuses again on the tight friendship between two young girls only this time, that bond is far more insidious. Both are cheerleaders who develop an unhealthy obsession with their new coach and how that obsession begins to define their friendship. It’s sort of Mean Girls meets Crush or Election only way darker and just as enthralling as The End of Everything.

9. More Baths, Less Talking (McSweeney’s/Believer)
By Nick Hornby

I love love love Nick Hornby. I haven’t written about him until now, but he’s one of those writers who I search out and gobble up every word they write (see also: Barbara Kingsolver, John Fowles, Anais Nin, Haruki Murakami, I could probably go on…). He’s equal parts smart and funny, which is nice, and he just, I dunno, writes the kinds of books I never want to stop reading. He also writes a column for The Believer called Stuff I’ve Been Reading which is really, really good. It’s sometimes rambly and oftentimes completely unrelated to books but it’s also probably the best and most realistic description of reading activity that I’ve seen from a book critic (every month there’s a list of the books he’s bought and the ones he’s read, they don’t always overlap) anyway, fan girl squeeing aside, this is a collection of one year’s worth of that column. Totally worth reading, but only if you love books… wait… if you don’t love books why are you even reading this?

8. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Bond Street)
By Rachel Joyce

An aging man gets a letter from an old friend that is dying and sets out on a really long walk to reconnect with her. Along the way he gets hurt, famous, considered senile, forgotten and finds peace. It’s such an odd premise that I had to read for myself. Rachel Joyce’s depiction of Harold Fry and his estranged wife is so quietly tragic that you just can’t help falling for them a little, and rooting for their failed marriage. The scene where she is pairing her clothes with his is just, perfect. This book is a slow ambler, kinda paced the way Harold is, so if you don’t have the patience, you might want to skip it.

7. The Twelve (Doubleday)
By Justin Cronin

The follow-up to 2010′s The Passage (which I just read this summer) deserves to be on this list solely for the anticipation it garnered while I waited for fall and my advanced copy… it’s a giant blockbuster of a series which is going to be a giant blockbuster of a movie too. You get the feeling that’s what Cronin always planned for in this epic sweeping action series about a military-made virus that ushers in the vampire apocalypse and the world’s human survivors that attempt to make sense of the world they grew up in decades upon decades later. This book wasn’t near as good as the first one but the story is still pretty awesome. Read it before they make it a movie so you can get in on the ground floor.

6. The Juliet Stories (House of Anansi)
By Carrie Snyder

They call it a novel-in-stories, but what Carrie Snyder manages in her second book is deeper and more coherent than that. Juliet grows up in Nicaragua (post-revolutionary war) with her two brothers as almost an afterthought for their activist parents, until illness drives them home and into the immediacy of conventional family life. Each early chapter is a glimpse, a hazy portrait of ten year old Juliet that doesn’t fully form until later, as a collection, comes understanding. Back in Canada, the fractured family continues to deal with reverberations from their past, unable to forgive each other, instead clinging to Nicaragua as this place out of time, free from the stamp of grief. It’s only in going back to confront the ghosts that Juliet is able to come to terms with her stories and begin a family of her own. Snyder is phenomenal here, crafting some of the most striking images and beautiful sentences that you will likely read all year. The Juliet Stories is not to be missed. (Re-posted from The Coast)

5. Inside (House of Anansi)
By Alix Ohlin

Short-listed for the Giller Prize, I’ve blogged about Inside before—Ohlin’s novel about Grace, a sincere therapist and the people she becomes entwined with will have you diagnosing characters left right and centre, although each one will manage to surprise you—it’s a bit obsessive and maddening but engrossing just the same. Although, most of the characters are unlikeable assholes that you don’t mind watching fall apart, so you definitely have to be into books where you don’t need to relate to or root for the people in it. Let’s just book club and laugh maniacally together as they fail.

4. Instruction Manual for Swallowing (ECW)
By Adam Marek

The only thing better than Adam Marek’s book of fantastic short stories is imagining how he possibly came up with them. Absurd, darkly comic and at times head-scratchingly bizarre, Marek’s talent for rending the supernatural or outrageous in real, human terms is mind-boggling. A couple finds out they are pregnant with 37 babies. A man is diagnosed with cancer just before the city he lives in is attacked by a Godzilla-like beast. A pet shop sells animals by volume. A man working in a restaurant for zombies finds out the meat is locally-sourced. Another man travels to the inner workings of his mind only to discover the controls are manned by Busta Rhymes. The premise is always wildly weird, but Marek manages to take the fantasy from unbelievable to relatable in a few short pages, surprising you with emotional insight not usually attributed to the sci-fi section. This is a gem of a collection—no story left behind. (Re-posted from The Coast)

3. Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield)

By Jaime Forsythe
In her first book of poetry, Forsythe manages to create a fascinating balance between the oddly witty and beautifully weird that most writers only dream about, or go wildly off the mark while attempting it. It’s a riveting collection that pays tribute to the strangeness in everyday life. I’ve written about it here and here already. That’s just how lovely it is. Plus, she’s from Halifax which makes it even better. (Who doesn’t love to read poetry that’s influenced by places they often frequent?) If you’re going to only read one book of poetry this year, it should be this one.

2. This is How You Lose Her (Riverhead)
By Junot Díaz
The follow-up short story collection to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sees Yunior’s life set against a backdrop of heartbreak. The women he loves and inevitably loses because of his own short-comings romanticize that special kind of failure in the tender, raw and darkly comedic way that Díaz has long perfected. It’s cut from the same cloth that Oscar Wao was—full of untranslated words and seemingly autobiographically-tinged sexism—so if that rubbed you the wrong way, then this will too. Personally, I’ll probably read everything Díaz throws at us, even that weird sci-fi epic that’s reportedly in the works called Monstro.

1. The Rook (Back Bay)
By Daniel O’Malley
One fantasy book to rule them all, The Rook is part Memento-esque amnesia mystery and part political thriller with a dash of Men in Black-level government-weird to keep you guessing, laughing and crossing your fingers for a sequel more than any other genre could. It’s exactly what you didn’t know you were looking for. When Myfanwy Thomas awakes in the rain with dead bodies surrounding her, she knows only what is provided by a letter in her pocket addressed to her from…herself. She learns that she holds a high level position in a secret supernatural government agency—organized like a chess board—and that a traitor from within stole her memories and still wants her dead. In a thrilling page turner that is as funny as it is suspenseful. Rook Thomas, guided by a suitcase of letters from her former meticulous self, needs to solve the mystery before her would-be murderer succeeds while juggling her everyday responsibilities like, oh, running an organization that employs people who type with tentacles, subverting a Frankenstein-esque Belgian invasion, and figuring out how to control her recently discovered superpowers. The Rook melds the best of all genres into a fantastically fun and intensely readable debut novel. (Re-posted from The Coast)

YAY! My top 5 books read this year, period, to follow.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore begins with struggling designer Clay Jannon happening upon a help-wanted sign in a mysterious bookstore, exactly the kind of bookstore that I would foam at the mouth to discover, let alone work for, but this is no ordinary bookstore—when Jannon’s curiosity leads him to open one of the books in the tall stacks of the “Waybacklist” he sets in motion an adventure of decoding, spying, infiltrating a secret society and the age-old quest for immortality that hangs heavy in almost all the fantasy novels of my youth. Like Clay Jannon, I owe a great deal of my own imaginative swings to great fantasy series like the Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials and The Lord of the Rings—for Clay, it’s his childhood love of a series called The Dragon-Song Chronicles that primes him for adventure in the first place (after all, if not a fantasy-lover, whose mind would automatically hover in a suspension of disbelief?) and then connects all the mysterious dots, like a key. But, as is the case for so many quests—the result, the treasure, the holy grail is never quite what you expect it to be.

The holy grail in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore isn’t what I thought it would be, and like some of the characters who were holding their breath for the secret of life, I was expecting a big hullabaloo, words of wisdom, a secret—the secret—and like so many who hold their breath for such things, I was ultimately disappointed… but only for a moment.

It’s not the quest that makes Sloan’s novel fantastic, not the fantasy, the mystery or the chase—it’s the very last paragraph in a brightly crafted, spinning read that moves you without even realizing it. It’s heart-warming, frenzied, often hilarious tribute to all the books that have come before, all the friendships you forge with the written word, and it’s this—the very last line, “A clerk and a ladder and a warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

Because sometimes, that’s all it takes. It’s the trump card, Sloan—you nailed it.