Books for 2014

EDIT: Further purchases that I'm excited to read...

Michelle Orange - This is Running for Your Life (essays)

• Bought this on a whim at the bookstore (yay, Pulpfiction Commercial Drive). I love essays, I like the cover, and the first essay is called The Uses of Nostalgia and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke's Face. I know nothing about the author. 

Adam Gopnik - The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (culture)

• Gopnik wrote one of my favourite books, Paris to the Moon, about raising a family in Paris. In this book he writes about food culture, another of my favourite reading topics. 

UPDATE: to add

Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot (play)

• I think Borges wrote something about this, and then I spotted it at one of the best book shops I know - the guy who sells on Commercial, around 7th. A few pages in and it's so clearly an influence of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

This is aspirational for now. I'm finishing up Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, a wonderful collection of short fictions and essays (and, oddly, parables), and planning my next books as I look longingly at my book shelf.

As an aside, Nina and I have been toying with the idea of forming a book club. Standard stuff, read a book, talk about it with friends over wine and beer, etc. Might try to do something with this, might not.

The books, though. What do I want to read...

Ian Rankin - Standing in Another Man's Grave (detective/mystery)

• A new Rebus book (when there weren't meant to be any more...). I grew up reading comfortable westerns, and this is about as close as I get to that. Frustratingly repetitive at times, but it's a long series and I'll be quite happy to burn through this.

Ian Rankin - The Impossible Dead (detective/mystery)

• The series/character that Rankin moved on to after the (not-quite) final Rebus book. It's of a style, but Rankin updated the stereotypes somewhat, and he really is very good at his craft.

Joe McGinniss - The Miracle of Castel di Sangro (soccer history/memoir)

• A story of small-town soccer in Italy as experienced by an American new to the sport. A bit of travel tourism, sports history, culture, etc.

Adam Gopnik - Winter (musings, or something)

• I like to read the Massey Lectures every year. I've fallen off the wagon a bit of late, but Gopnik wrote one of my favourite books, Paris to the Moon, so I'm back, baby.

Lisa Moore - Alligator (fiction)

• Small-town Newfoundland, and the author won an award recently. That's all I know. 

Salman Rushdie - Fury (fiction)

• After reading his excellent memoir, Joseph Anton, I wanted to read more fiction by Rushdie, and I'll be damned if I'm going to try Midnight's Children for the third time...

Edmund White - The Flâneur (more musings)

• I love the word flâneur - it might be the most romantic word I know. White lived in Paris, and here he writes about his days there, wandering about the city, etc. I imagine the book is pretentious but fun.

Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote

• This is an ambitious move on my part. It's a bloody huge book. I'm looking for interested reading buddies to take this on with me. Borges has such high praise for this book, and since he's my latest authorial obsession...

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There, that's a decent list. I'd like to add a few more soccer books in there (most notably Dennis Bergkamp's well-received autobiography Stillness and Speed - here, watch one of the most beautiful goals ever scored). I'm certainly not as prolific a reader as I once was, or anywhere close to my friend Derrick's speed-datingreading regime...

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Oh go on, watch this other amazing goal by Bergkamp:

Michael Ignatieff

Is it time to weigh in on Michael Ignatieff, torturer of Ukrainian wars in Iraq? I think so. Will he be our next Prime Minister? Seems likely. After more than a hundred years of every Liberal leader becoming PM, it's unlikely that there would be two in a row to miss out.

I have an odd relationship with Michael Ignatieff. As an undergrad I read some of his work, and was quite impressed. If you have any questions about what he thinks Canada can be, please read The Rights Revolution, his Massey Lecture from 2000, the year he took the post of Director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights.

I remember reading his piece in the New York Times advocating for the American invasion in Iraq and thinking something like: "Doesn't he see what we all can see, that this is a sham?" It had little to do with American values, and there were never going to beWMD found. For him it was about saving the Kurds and the Iraqi people, a position I can understand. I'm a big fan of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, but in practical terms it's a big ol' mess. Read: Iraq.

And then he came back to Canada. In his nomination and election campaign he faced criticism about his views on nations and nationalism (patently ridiculous to anyone who actually read his books), his support for the Iraq war and his misinterpreted position on the use of torture in a democracy.

Just so it's all on the table: I was hoping he would win the Liberal leadership race in 2006. We all know how Stephane Dion turned out, and my friends and I warned everyone. Of course he wasn't experienced enough. Of course he had baggage. And the wait probably did him some good: he has proven to be a competent parliamentarian in the interregnum.

And now he's the leader and presumptive Prime Minister of Canada. (I say this even though he has clearly stated that he isn't presuming to be the next Prime Minister of Canada.) Care for some recent media pieces about the man who would be king?

What he would do if he were PM, as told to Macleans in 2006.
A great piece by Terry Glavin at the Georgia Straight, 2006.
George Strombo interviews him on the Hour: Part 1. Part 2.
A blog post at Macleans that has many links to recent interviews and commentary.
Haroon Siddiqui at the Star weighs in again. (More later.)

If you want real background on the man, read his books. Read The Lesser Evil if you want to know his position on torture, don't read a few quoted lines on the interweb and presume to understand an entire book.

Edit: Or try a search for Ignatieff at the NYT. Their catalog from 1851 is available online, and there are 2340 results, many referring to Russian Counts and Generals and dating from the 19th century.