I’ve been meaning to read The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon since it came out last year. The Golden Mean got tons of great reviews, nominated for the 2009 CanLit triple crown (the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), was a banned book (that’s when you know you’ve made it) and was even recently nominated for a Bad Sex in Fiction award.

I finally got around to it in December, and while it was enjoyable, it was very dense. I found I couldn’t read more than a scene or two in a sitting, which is very uncommon for me. However, it did re-spark an interest in Greek history that I’d forgotten, and made me more curious about Greek philosophers, which I haven’t really studied in great detail.

On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons.

Initially Aristotle hopes for a short stay in what he considers the brutal backwater of his childhood. But, as a man of relentless curiosity and reason, Aristotle warms to the challenge of instructing his young charges, particularly Alexander, in whom he recognizes a kindred spirit, an engaged, questioning mind coupled with a unique sense of position and destiny.

Aristotle struggles to match his ideas against the warrior culture that is Alexander’s birthright. He feels that teaching this startling, charming, sometimes horrifying boy is a desperate necessity. And that what the boy – thrown before his time onto his father’s battlefields – needs most is to learn the golden mean, that elusive balance between extremes that Aristotle hopes will mitigate the boy’s will to conquer.

Exploring this fabled time and place, Annabel Lyon tells her story in the earthy, frank, and perceptive voice of Aristotle himself. With sensual and muscular prose, she explores how Aristotle’s genius touched the boy who would conquer the known world. And she reveals how we still live with the ghosts of both men.

From the publisher, Random House of Canada (shorted)

“In philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, the golden mean is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.” [Source: Wikipedia]. Vancouver author, Annabel Lyon subtly included a lot of philosophy, particularly the beginnings of Aristotle’s teachings. I haven’t studied philosophy myself, although I would really like to; reading The Golden Mean piqued that interest.

The Golden Mean‘s narrative was almost a stream-of-consciousness of Aristotle’s thoughts (or, how Annabel Lyon imagined them). While I cannot comment on the accuracy, I can say that the voice felt very authentic. Most of the time was spent musing life and goings-on with Aristotle, my favourite parts were the discussions between himself and Alexander. It was interesting to see his mind develop and I think I would have enjoyed a more omniscient narrator to better understand Alexander’s thoughts.

While Aristotle’s musings in philosophy were interested, I particularly enjoyed scenes where he studied biology and zoology, including animal dissection and human autopsy. It was just really neat to read the thoughts and beliefs of Greek professors. I really liked Aristotle’s classification of animals, humours, people, and everything in the order of the world. It was interesting for me to sit back and compare today’s world, thoughts, visions, and beliefs… and just see how far we’ve come (and sometimes haven’t).

• Read an excerpt from The Golden Mean
• Georgia Straight interview with Annabel Lyon
• Largehearted Boy Book Notes music playlist for The Golden Mean
• Annabel Lyon’s blog
• Annabel Lyon listed, BC’s 100 Most Influential Women by The Vancouver Sun.
  
• Winner of the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
• Nominated for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Nominated for the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Awards – Fiction
• Nominated for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean)
• Nominated for the 2010 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award
• Nominated for the 2010 BC Book Prize’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

It’s a very exciting time for book people this time of year. All the major prizes are announcing their long lists, or shortlists, or winners. Lots of great book chatter happening. I’ll sum things up as best I can.

In Canuckland (aka Canada), the three big literary prizes are: The Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Governor General’s Awards, and The Rogers’ Writer’s Trust Award. Both the GG’s and the Writer’s Trust awards have multiple categories (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc.), while the Giller’s are specifically for fiction.

Here’s some more Canadian book award news:

• The Giller’s announced their shortlist on October 5, whittled down from the longlist announced September 20. The Giller longlist included Room by Emma Donoghue, and the shortlist includes Annabel by Kathleen Winter. They’re also having a reader contest to Guess the Giller. The Giller winner will be announced on November 9, 2010.
• The Canada Council for the Arts funds, administers and promotes the Governor General’s Awards. The GG’s have 14 categories (seven each in English and in French). The shortlist was announced on October 13 and the winners will be announced November 16, with award presentations on the 25th (with the Governor General present).
• The Writer’s Trust Award shortlist for fiction includes both Emma Donoghue and Kathleen Winter. A selection of finalists will read at the International Festival of Authors on October 27 in Toronto.
• CBC Literary Awards are for unpublished French and English books, the only award of it’s kind. Submissions close on November 1, 2010.
• Speaking of deadlines, the deadline for the BC Book Prizes is December 1, 2010.  Last year’s fiction winner was Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison by Cathleen With, which I really liked.
• And the deadline for Amazon.ca’s First Book Award is also November 1, 2010. Last year’s winner was Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant, which I reviewed and really enjoyed.
• As I mentioned, CBC Radio’s Canada Reads is operating in a different format this year. Today they announced their Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels, which is the first part of their competition. It includes Come, Thou Tortoise, Room, and February. Oddly it didn’t include Annabel. Now, go vote for the Top 10 list (announced November 9th)

There is lots going on internationally too:

• Submissions are still being read for the International 3-Day Novel Contest. They received a whopping 669 entries this year! Based out of Vancouver, BC, the 3-Day Novel Contest is run during the September long weekend. The winner will be announced in January.
• The Man Booker Prize was awarded to Howard Jacobson on October 12, 2010. The shortlist had been announced September 7, 2010. Canadian writer Emma Donoghue was shortlisted for Room.
• There is a new Danish literary award, the inaugural Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize. It was awarded last week to J.K. Rowling, a whopping $95K… like she needed the money.
• Finalists for the National Book Award (USA) were announced on October 13, 2010.

If you want more information on Literary Prizes (both Canadian and internationally), I highly suggest you visit CanLitAwards.com. Fantastic, comprehensive, up-to-date database of literary awards.

Last week CW and I went to Value Village to look for some books for him. Value Village has secondhand books priced on a sliding scale which depends on the original cover price. All hardcovers at $3.99, and then fiction paperbacks that were originally $8+ are sold for $4.99, anything that was $6-8 is now $3.99 and so on and so on. Children’s books and non-fiction are flat prices. Sometimes you can get a good deal.

My only beef with the system is downstairs (where the books are at my local Value Village) the signage says, “Buy 3, Get The 4th Free” but upstairs at the till (for the employees) it says, “Buy 4, Get the 5th Free”. They didn’t believe me and although I am stubborn enough to make a staff member go check, there were other people in line so I didn’t push it. We had four books (I had three, CW had one) and the people behind us at the till had one. They suggested we get their book for free and they would give us $5 for it. Problem solved.

Now, the books. CW got a copy of Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind, the first book in the Sword of Truth series. This is his favourite series and we each have a copy of the entire series (his is in England, mine is here). We also have several extra copies that CW likes to lend to friends but the first book in the series is MIA.

I picked up three books: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards; Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant; and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean.

Why did I pick up these books? I heard good things about The Memory Keeper’s Daughter when it first came out. Come, Thou Tortoise is the first novel by Canadian author Jessica Grant, and was getting gushing reviews. Also, she just won Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award. I am a big Stuart McLean fan and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe is one of the (few) Vinyl Cafe books I don’t yet own.

The BC Book Prizes announced the 2010 Finalists on Thursday, March 11. Yes, this is self-promo since I work with the BC Book Prizes, but I really believe in what we do so I don’t care! There are some great authors and illustrators listed for seven different awards. We also organize a free Soirée and right now we’re planning our 7th annual BC Book Prizes On Tour. This tour takes finalist authors all over the province — we’re planning three legs: Northern BC, Kootenays, Okanagan and Vancouver Island. Sign up for email newsletters on our website to get all the updates.

Canada Reads 2010 also concluded the debates on Friday, March 12. The winner was Nikolski by Nicolas Dicker, translated by Lazer Lederhendler. In my review of Nikolski, I mention I was pleasantly surprised by the translation. However, I’d like to comment that the Canada Reads debates weren’t as intriguing for me this year compared to last year. I remember painting my bedroom last March/April and listening to the debates. I kept thinking “oh I want to read that” for each of the books. I loved The Book Of Negroes and still really want to read Fruit: A Novel About A Boy and His Nipples by Brian Frances and Outlander by Gil Adamson. I think that this year they spent too long debating what makes a book “Canadian”, which was never really the point of Canada Reads. I guess that they [CBC/Canada Reads] need to make their criteria less vague (“A book that all Canadians should read”) so that they [the champions] spend more time talking about the books themselves.

The UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction also released the 2010 longlist today. The Guardian newspaper in the UK has a great mini-site set up so you can browse through the titles. Some of the books have now been added to my TBR mountain, including Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel which also won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison, one of seven debut novelists.

Also, of note:

• The 2010 Pulitzer Prize (Pull it, Surprise!) awards will be announced April 12.
• On March 8, 2010, the Jury for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize was announced. The Gillers announces their longlist in September, shortlist in October, and winner in November.

P.S. If anyone knows of anything I missed, please let me know! I love hearing about new things in the publishing community.

Some people have been disappointed with the Canada Reads 2010 list. Reasons include the authors/publishers/books being too well-known already. There are two new grassroots challenges called Canada Reads Independently and Canada Also Reads which aim to shed light on the lesser known titles/authors/publishers. How very Canadian of us! Personally, I haven’t read any of the books but I did know of Generation X and The Jade Peony already. I’m enjoying reading the Canada Reads list but also want to spread the word about these Canadian works too.

CANADA READS INDEPENDENTLY

When I first heard about Canada Reads Independently 2010, I thought it was a list of books from independent presses. Wrong. It turns out that Kerry Clare of Pickle Me This launched Canada Reads 2010: Independently for a different reason. Kerry says, “I’m not going to knock [Canada Reads] because I love the spirit behind the whole thing… but it just wasn’t the reading list for me. What I wanted was what I found from (most of) the 2009 lineup– book recommendations out of nowhere, books I’d never pick up otherwise, that challenge my sensibilities, and that I might just fall in love with.”

In an interview with Julie Wilson (aka BookMadam) at CBC Book Club, Kerry said, “I’m going to be reading the five books over the next two months, posting reviews as I go, and rating the books against one another. I’ll be inviting other readers to comment on my reactions to the books, perhaps have some guest posts and coverage of other readers’ reviews, and then I’ll choose my own favourite of the bunch, and we’ll have a vote to come up with a readers’ choice champion as well. And I’m hoping my “celebrity panelists” will be able to weigh in from time to time in their book’s defence, which should be fun.”

The books:

• Moody Food by Ray Robertson
  (championed by Steven W. Beattie of the Quill & Quire)
• How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad
  (championed by author Rona Maynard)
• Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso
  (championed by Melanie Owen of Roughing it in the Books)
• Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
  (championed by illustrator Patricia Storms)
• Century by Ray Smith
  (championed by publisher/bookseller/editor Dan Wells of Biblioasis)

CANADA ALSO READS

The National Post’s book blog The Afterword has released a selection of titles called Canada Also Reads 2010. When the Canada Reads list was released, they agreed with “many of the 140-character-or-less comments that appeared in the moments after this year’s crop was unveiled: these are great books, but haven’t they already been read?” And so Canada Also Reads was born. They are “a fan of what Canada Reads has done to promote CanLit, we figured this would be a great opportunity to help shine a light on some of the books sitting in the shadows. What books should Canada also read, we asked? We were immediately inundated with hundreds and hundreds of submissions from readers across the country.”

The books:

• My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman
  (defended by writer and critic Steven Beattie)
• The Day The Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan
  (defended by author Tish Cohen)
• Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis
  (defended by singer/songwriter Andy Maize)
• The Last Shot by Leon Rooke
  (defended by poet Jacob McArthur Mooney)
• Yellowknife by Steve Zipp
  (defended by blogger John Mutford)
• You And The Pirates by Jocelyne Allen
  (defended by author Lisa Pasold)
• Come Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant
  (defended by author Neil Smith)
• Fear of Fighting by Stacey May Fowles, pictures by Marlena Zuber
  (defended by author Zoe Whittall)