I read a lot - not as much as some, but a hell of a lot more than others. Primarily, I read comic books, and I've been doing so since the fourth grade. I read them on the can, in the bath, before bed, while driving or operating heavy equipment, during my lunch hour at work, or while I'm performing my daily duties as a brain surgeon. Most of my book reading (You remember books… the hefty rectangular things with lots of pages and tiny little black marks they issued to you in grade school) is done on the subway, on the way to work or on the way from work. It's an hour commute, so that's a good 120-minutes of eye-straining a day. Occasionally, if I'm really into a book I can be found devouring it during dinner or the wee hours of the morning. Likewise, when I'm on vacation I usually inhale the things. Having said that, I don't think I read nearly as much as I should. I'm still programmed with the idea that reading equals good and television or video games or whatever equals bad. On the flipside, it often occurs to me that the fine art of 'people watching' - especially on a metropolitan subway - is about a thousand times more rewarding than any ol' potboiler.

Anyway, compiled here for your reading pleasure is a list of just some of the books I could be seen reading weekday mornings and evenings on the Toronto subway system during the 2006 calendar year, hitting all stops between Woodbine Station and King Station. This list is in no real order of preference - unless you discount alphabetical order! Ooooh yeaaaah, sweet, sexy alphabetical order… …um, anyway, my only goal (aside from bragging about how many big books I readed) is that someone out there finds a recommendation in this summary which leads to a fantastic personal literary experience.

But yeah, the whole bragging thing is pretty much the main reason I'm writing this. Plus, I wrote a similar article for metaball.ca just over a year ago, and doing it again means I can cut-and-paste the previous introductory section, saving me lots of time to watch television.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die - Robert Dimery and Michael Lydon I'm a total sucker for big lists (you know, the type Entertainment Weekly publishes… well, weekly), and I'm also a popular music enthusiast. Put them together, and you've got this fantastic hardcover full of album recommendations, reviews, artwork and photography. Well researched, all-encompassing, and in chorological order of release, I'll be going back to this reference book for years. While I've gotten to hear some amazing albums I'd normally never have gotten to (The Monks, The Sonics, and Dave Brubeck) there are some weird inclusions that leave me scratching my head… I mean, the Pet Shop Boys are good, but every damned album of theirs is in here! There are some weird omissions, too… but for the most part, it's right on the money.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die - by Peter Ackroyd and Peter Boxall After enjoying the previous book in this list (1001 Albums…) my wife picked up this sister book as a present. Interesting in its own right, it's a little bit harder to tackle than 1001 Albums… you can't just download and read a book in an hour the way you can sample an album. It does a great job of covering a fairly broad timeframe, and includes novels dating all the way back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, and all the way up to Life Of Pi. Several of the other books on this list were culled from 1001 Books… and for the most part it's been right on the money.

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby This novel begs to made into either a movie or a play. Here's the premise: four very different strangers, one of them a mini-celebrity, all climb to the top of the same building to commit suicide on New Year's Eve in London. They meet, convince each other to come down, and for one reason or another can't stay apart for very long. A tragic comedy, it's equally funny and sad, irreverent and spiritual. Like Hornby's other major works, About A Boy and High Fidelity, it's a very 'modern'-feeling novel that leans towards the sentimental without losing its edge. The characters are well-written and fully fleshed-out, and their vast differences really speak to Hornby's ability to craft fascinating identities, which in this case really fuel the story, rather than any plot.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka My wife bought this one for some reason, and I picked it up at random and breezed through it. A really nice little story about the middle-aged daughter of Ukranian immigrants, living in London, who has to deal with her depressed father who has taken in a gaudy, good-for-nothing young wife from the old country who treats him like garbage. Sometimes funny and sometimes tragic, it may sound like something you'll never be able to relate to, but the universal themes and sentiment really carry it across. As a sometimes-silly domestic drama, anyone could relate to it on a fairly personal level, I'm sure.

A.L.I.E.E.N. - Lewis Trondheim Supposedly, Trondheim "found" this book in a smoking crater while hiking in the mountains of France with his family - a discarded or forgotten alien's children's book. It looks and reads like a weird comic book, and all of the text is in some unknown alien language, which is odd… but when you pay close attention, you'll notice that all of the little vignettes contained herein (about different colourful alien critters, one of whom can't control his pooping) feed into one another and actually link up quite nicely. So, it's a great piece of art in concept as well as in execution. If not for The Pride of Baghdad, A.L.I.E.E.N. would have been the single best comic book I've read all year.

Beasts Of No Nation - Uzodinma Iweala Everyone went on and on about how Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-prize winning book The Road was oh-so heavy duty. Clearly, none of those people have read Beasts of No Nation, easily the single heaviest, darkest, and most depressingly brutal novel I have ever read in my life. The story of a child soldier in war-torn Africa, and how he's kidnapped from his village, drugged, raped, taught to kill, murder, torture, and rape, this novel is even scarier in one striking regard - it's true a thousand times over. The Road is fictional and hypothetical, where as this poor kid's life is reflected in reality over and over again in Africa today. While it's ultimately a story of redemption (perhaps) and a musing on the nature of the soul and guilt, Beasts of No Nation is not for the faint of heart or the weak of constitution. It's one tough, heartbreaking book of pure Godless evil as told through the eyes of a child.

Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006 - Chip Kidd, David Sedaris, and John Updike Wow, that's a lot of colons in a title. Anyway, this is an awkward-to-carry if not nice-to-own collection of book covers and jacket designs by Chip Kidd, presented in his unique and unusual style, pretty much by Kidd himself. Basically, try to imagine one of his distinctive hardcover layouts, all kaleidoscopic and illuminated with large, cut-up typography, spread across the length and breadth of a massive coffee-table book. It's an adventure for the eyes, and while

I think maybe he should have chosen his best work to showcase rather than all of it (it gets a bit much after a while), it's still a notable piece of art in its own right.

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell This was probably my favourite book of the year. It's a series of stories, each set in a different time period, and each within a different genre. However, each story is nested inside the previous… much like one of those wooden Russian Dolls. As first it's off-putting - you get the climax of the first story, and then it's interrupted - mid-sentence - by the start of the second story, and so on and so on. Each story appears as a story in the following narrative (the diaries that comprise the second story, for example, are discovered by a character in the third). At the midway point of the book, set in a dystopian future, things shift gear, and we finally get the second halves of all of the previous stories. Here's the kicker - there is actually a story and journey that is carried all the way through, despite the crazy, gimmicky format. In any case, I had a ball with this, even though my wife really didn't care for it.

Collapse - Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, And Steel, Diamond's award-winning previous book, was a great read, although I wasn't clear on what the point was - is there any real debate that guns, germs, and steel can cause one culture to 'defeat' another? In any case, Collapse is much more straightforward - Diamond uses several historical examples of total societal collapse to create a model for potential cultural apocalypse - with hard science supporting it. The chapter on Easter Island alone inspired me to write an article for metaball.ca . A nice history / science / sociology textbook to give the most average reader a bucketful of new perspectives on the environment, demographics, and even religion.

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson I wasn't convinced of Stephenson's genius, having barely managed to make it through the thoroughly disappointing Quicksilver… but I decided to go back to the well and try again, since Cryptonomicon won every science fiction award on the planet and came pretty highly recommended. I love historical fiction and sci-fi, so I should love this book… but it was another tough slog. His writing is far too dense and a little bit sluggish… he has the gift of solid prose, but not the gift of pace. I was happy when I was finished this one, just for the sake of it all being over. It's too full of superfluity in all the wrong places.

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card The bookstore I go to has an 'awards' section, and Ender's Game, a very famous sci-fi novel that I had never read, was sitting in that section, having won oodles of awards back in the day. It was cheap, so I picked it up (despite my dislike for Card's comic book work) and was pleasantly surprised. For a book written in the 1970s, it resonated eerily well today. It's about a bunch of kindergarten-age kids who are trained by the government to be intergalactic soldiers - by forcing them to play video games. It's got quite the alarming ending, and I strongly recommend it to sci-fi fans and 'normal' folk alike.

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson I picked this one up because it won the Pulitzer, but wasn't that impressed. It's a nice little story about a small-town preacher leading a small town life half a century or so ago… you know, helping people with their problems, teaching the gospel, sittin' in a rocking chair, remembering his grandfather… ho-hum. An old troubled teenager, now all growed-up, comes back to town and opens old wounds. Not a bad book, but definitely not my cup of tea. It's basically a novel-length musing on impending death and looking back on life. More my Grandmother's speed.

Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt - Nick Hornby Here's an interesting idea… keep a journal of the books you've bought, and even read some of 'em. Hornby is a good enough writer that just his thoughts on the books alone makes for a fun read - and actually inspired me to check out a few of his recommendations. His take on Motley Crue's autobiography, The Dirt, which I read a few years ago (and loved like a train wreck) is simply hilarious. I also love how up front the guy is about abandoning books that he can't stand. I wish I could figure out how to do that.

I Am Legend - Richard Matheson This book is supposedly a landmark piece of horror writing. I guess I just don't see it… a novella about an old man holed up in his house during a post-apocalyptic zombie infestation. At night, the zombies come to his house, knock on his door, and verbally try to convince him to let them in. Now, I understand that this short story was the basis for the film The Omega Man, but really… there's not that much here. It's an old man with a shotgun pissed off at zombies.

JPod - Douglas Coupland It's brilliant, but… it's Douglas Coupland, so what do you expect? As though he's going out of his way to really root this story (about some PlayStation developers who decide to sabotage a game they're building) in the moment, it's full of so much modern jargon and so many pop culture references that my grandmother wouldn't be able to make it past the first paragraph, and she's an avid reader! Like Generation X before it, Coupland, a real culture vulture, seems to have pretty much nailed the niche he's both writing for and writing about. Sometimes it felt like the guy must've had a window into my life, which is weird, let me tell you. Even though he wrote himself into the novel as a character, which kinda bugs me, he still managed to write one of the best books I read all year.

Killing Yourself To Live - Chuck Klosterman Klosterman's essay collection, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, is a summation of everything I aspire to - a collection of irreverent essays on stupid topics that are somehow relevant, insightful, and funny. Killing Yourself to Live, his previous book, is a memoir-biography-travelogue about a road trip with a lady friend across the United States. Along the way, he waxes poetic on everything from how Radiohead's Kid A eerily predicted 9-11 to his own failings as a boyfriend. Sometimes light and fluffy, sometimes dismal and depressing, there's a lot in here that anyone can relate to, with Klosterman's unique viewpoint thrown in for comedic punctuation. Check it out! He's snarky and nerdy, but it all paints a complete picture.

Micronations - John Ryan, George Dunford, and Simon Sellars Perhaps inspired by the JetLag travel guides, Micronations is a fun little parody travel guidebook by Lonely Planet, makers of the world's best real travel guidebooks. Unlike Molvania, Phaic Tan, or San Sombrero, however, Micronations is the real deal - a real travel guide to real places. The catch? These places themselves are bizarre… it's a list of weirdoes who for one reason or another have declared their own independent countries in their own back yard (or on oil platforms or motor homes or Antarctica). They've got flags, stamps, national anthems, monarchies… it's lots of fun, and the best part is - it's all real!

Monkey Portraits - Jill Greenberg I bought this book for my infant daughter as a Christmas present. She loves monkeys, and Jill Greenberg, who is famous for taking photos of Gwen Stefani and crying children, had this little hardcover number available. I saw it in an open bookstore window, loved what I saw, and had it gift wrapped. Now, I'm sure my daughter can't grasp the quality of the photos themselves (which are stunning and dramatic), but she has learned a lot about different species of monkeys, apes, and other primates. Greenberg's photos of Mandrills in particular are equally fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying.

Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan and Richard Holbrooke What an amazing book. An inside look at the steamy, sordid goings-on behind the closed doors of the peace conference at Versailles following World War One between Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau. Actually, it wasn't that steamy or sordid, but it was pretty crazy - the deals and treaties that these guys made are still affecting the world today (Iraq, anyone?), and the birth of multinational diplomacy sure did have its rough patches. It's a great story in its own right (the bit where the Chinese delegation makes everyone dinner and the section where Clemenceau makes Lloyd George cry are both oddly surreal and funny), but if you're a history buff it's vital.

Phaic Tan and San Sombrero - by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch From the makers of the Molvania parody travel guide come these two sequels, which aren't as funny as the original (I'm a bit biased, having read Molvania whilst vacationing in Eastern Europe, the region being parodied) but are still fun in their own right. Phaic Tan skewers southeast Asia, and San Sombrero refries Latin America. While I wonder if people from these regions might be somewhat offended by the National Lampoon-ish irreverence, I'm sure most folks would find them pretty

funny. It probably helps if you've been to the areas being sent-up, but whatever. The restaurant reviews and 'travel on a shoestring' sections are hilarious.

Pride of Baghdad - By Brian K. Vaughan and Nike Henrichon This was the best comic book I read all year, and perhaps the best book I read all year, period. Brian K. Vaughan, author of luminary comic books as Y - The Last Man and Ex Machina crafts a dreamlike fable about a pride of lions in the Baghdad zoo. When the Americans invade, the lions find themselves free… but that freedom comes at the cost of their security, and the price they must pay is outright chaos. Based on a reportedly true story, it serves as a not-so-subtle metaphor about the situation in Iraq, but doesn't hit anyone over the head and lets the story flow naturally - mostly in part to Henrichon's gorgeous Disney-esque painted artwork. Having said that, though - The Lion King this ain't. If you're reading this, you owe it to yourself to check this book out. It's totally brilliant.

Supply And Demand: The Art Of Shepard Fairey - Shepard Fairey As a guy living and working in an urban area, I've run across Shepard Fairy's 'Obey the Giant' stickers from time to time, and I've seen a few of his pieces elsewhere (album covers and rock posters, etc). However, while I was getting tattooed this winter I noticed Fairey's art book on a shelf and flipped through it, and fell in love. Sure, the guy really limits himself - his subject matter, chosen medium, and even his colour scheme is stringently adhered to… but the end result is a gorgeous body of (admittedly somewhat derivative) work. Check it out!

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho My wife bugged me to read this one, seeing as how it's short, simple, and a pretty quick read. This well-known fable about finding your purpose in life and following your dreams and/or destiny makes for a nice fable, but I really only found it a few degrees better than those insipid Chicken Soup… books. This is the kind of book you can give your lovelorn aunt or your woe begotten teenage daughter to inspire them. Okay… maybe I'm being too hard on this book. But, really - it's a nice fable, but it's not, like, deep complicated literature or anything.

The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins Regular and faithful metaball readers will already know that this book inspired me to write my four-part (five-part?) essay on Intelligent Design. It's a pretty decent read, especially for someone who ain't exactly scientifically inclined. It travels backwards in time, looking at the evolutionary benchmarks in which all species 'broke off' from one another, from Man all the way back to unicellular life. My only criticism is Dawkins' 'attitude' - the book would be a whole lot more magical and special if he didn't throw snarky barbs at Conservatives and religious zealots every few paragraphs. Making fun of creationists tends to make Dawkins come off as a guy making fun of the mentally challenged.

The Art of Brian Bolland - Brian Bolland This was an interesting art book. Known as being a pretty fantastic and distinctive comic book cover artist, here he catalogues his own stuff and critiques it all, as well as giving his life story along the way. An artist's insight on his or her own work is always valuable, but Bolland's often scathing dislike for some of his own work is pretty startling at times. It's a treat to see a lot of his unreleased sketches, designs, and just 'for fun' pieces, and having it presented in such a large, full-colour format really showcases his body of work and makes it look as gorgeous as it deserves to look.

The Dark Tower - Stephen King After learning that King's The Dark Tower was to be adapted in comic book form, I figured I'd better hop back on the Stephen King express (which I had jumped off of in the tenth grade) and finish the lengthy series of novels, which I had abandoned after the third volume. Unfortunately, I think that book three (The Waste Lands) was the high point of the series - the second last book especially feels incredibly rushed. I loved the ending, however, and even though Stephen King did manage to somehow turn himself into a major character, as a work of science fiction and fantasy, it's not half bad. Better than the comic book that it's inspired, in any case.

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World - A. J. Jacobs This was another favourite. A. J. Jacobs, writer for Esquire magazine, decides to finish his father's interrupted quest to become the smartest person alive by reading the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica from start to finish… no small task! It takes Jacobs about a year, during which he also tries to knock up his wife, meets Alex Trebek, and appears on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. It's sweet, it's funny, and it's full of Jacobs' delightful insights on the little tidbits he learns during his strange quest. Does it make him the smartest man in the world? Definitely not - but he sure did get a GREAT book out of the ordeal.

The Places In Between - Rory Stewart This book made me so jealous. A former soldier and historian, he walked from Scotland (as I understand it) all the way through to India and Nepal… which means walking right across Afghanistan, the subject of this book. Sort of like a Michael Palin travelogue with more death threats, Islamic militants, and weirdness right out of the Wizard of Oz, The Places In Between made me wish I could walk in the man's footsteps… only unlike Stewart, I'd rather do the whole thing with friendly armed bodyguards, and I'd wait for things to settle down. Stewart pulled it off right after 9-11, and actually managed to walk through Taliban encampments unscathed. Imagine walking through a lawless, arid wilderness, only to stumble upon the remnants of a heretofore believed mythological society (Look up the Minaret of Jam)… Amazing.

The Plot Against America - Philip Roth What an interesting book - novelist Philip Roth's memoirs as a young lad growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in suburban America during the 1940s. However, things get even tougher when Charles Lindbergh becomes President…? And sympathises with Hitler…? The whole thing is a helping slice of paranoid alternate-reality historical biography (a new genre?) - if only Roth hadn't packed in a second volume's worth of story and pulse-pounding action into the last couple of chapters, it would feel a little less uneven. Still, a brilliant work.

The Prestige - Christopher Priest I grabbed this one early in 2006, thinking it was by a different Christopher Priest, and not knowing that it was to become a movie a few months later. If you've seen the flick, you know a lot of the story's twists and turns… a carefully structured Victorian suspense/mystery rooted in the present day, with equal parts horror and science fiction thrown in. The movie goes places the book doesn't and the book goes a lot of places that the movie doesn't… but they really seem to compliment each other. It's a pulpy thriller, sure… but it really does manage to go places you never think it will, and the twists and turns and surprises really do pay off. A lot of fun for sure.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy Metacritic.com had this book ranked ridiculously high for 2006, so I couldn't wait to read it, being a fan of apocalyptic literature. I really had high expectations - it won the frigging Pulitzer Prize for literature, for heaven's sake! That's no small endorsement! This book surprised me in two ways. First of all, it wasn't the most amazing thing I had ever read… I mean, it wasn't bad or anything, it's was just… fine. A nice yarn about a father protecting his son as they walk through post-apocalyptic America. Nightmarish, emotional, and sweet at the same time. The other surprise came when Oprah chose it as one of her 'book club' selections. What the hell?! Jane Eyre this ain't… unless Brontë wrote about cannibalism.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami This one was recommended to me by a famous author who professed to have the same taste in books as me. It's probably the closest thing to a narrative David Lynch movie that I've ever read (although most other people I've talked to who have read the book strongly disagree)… it's about a mild-mannered Japanese house husband whose wife up and vanishes the same day that their cat goes missing. Our hero befriends a mystic, a local teenager, and takes to hanging out in the bottom of wells. It's weird, but extremely well-written, easy to follow, and goes places you never expect it to go. A worthwhile read - even the scene where the guy gets skinned alive by crazy Mongolians is great.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty - Bradley K. Martin A year ago I would have loved to visit North Korea, just to claim that I managed to pull it off. Having read this complicated biography of Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, I realize that visiting North Korea would be tantamount to taking a vacation in a concentration camp. Frightening, fascinating, and bizarre, this book paints a picture not just of revolutionary megalomaniacs, but of an otherworldly dystopia that's almost impossible to conceive of. While it does manage to also contain a lot of hope for the future of a possibly united Korea, it doesn't leave me thinking that it'll happen in my lifetime. A harrowing biography - check out the part where Kim kidnaps South Korean movie stars and forces them to make propaganda films. Really weird stuff.

Zappa: A Biography - Barry Miles It's clear where Miles' loyalties lie - as a fan, he's a fan of Zappa's early work with the original Mothers of Invention, and not so much with his later material (I like his 70s work the best by far). As a writer, he's interested not in praising the man as an infallible musical genius (the way a lot of biographers do), but in finding some sort of middle ground by portraying him 'warts and all', pointing out his curmudgeonly flaws. All in all, it's a biography that portrays Zappa as something of a total asshole, albeit a brilliant and driven one. Even if you disagree with Miles' viewpoint for one reason or another, it's still a great and incredibly comprehensive biography.

- Evan Long

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