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Bookmark These Pages | Books by Roberto Bolaño, Rebecca Rosenblum, and Naomi Klein were among the year’s best — at least according to The New York Times, Quill & Quire, and The Guardian.

Q&Q!
Cockroach Capitalism
But what about Canadian titles, you ask? We can write a pretty decent book here in Canada, right? Quill & Quire would definitely agree with that proposition: their favourite Canadian books of 2008 include predictable choices like Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, Margaret Atwood’s debt disquisition Payback, and Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle, but also a few lower-profile picks from young writers like Rebecca Rosenblum’s story collection Once and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s graphic novel Skim — not to mention Jennifer McLagan’s cookbook Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes.

NYT!
Party Like It’s 2666
With the local theatre scene experiencing its annual Christmastime slumber, it’s the perfect time for Arts News to decamp to the bookstore and find out which of 2008’s hundreds of new titles have made it onto the various “best of the year” lists. First up: The New York Times. Among their picks: 2666, the posthumous masterpiece by Roberto Bolaño; The Dark Side, Jane Mayer’s revealing look at George W. Bush’s antiterrorist policies; The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul; and, most gratifyingly, Dangerous Laughter, a new collection of stories by the great Steven Millhauser.

UK!
Awe For Shock
An finally, a tip of the hat is due to Robert McCrum from The Guardian, who accompanied each of his selections for the year’s best books with a “relationship quotient” indicating the closeness of his friendship with the author. With the foofaraw surrounding Jacob Scheier’s controversial win at this year’s Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, it’s a welcome bit of transparency. McCrum’s selections include Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (relationship quotient: 0), Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self (relationship quotient: 8), and Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (relationship quotient: 9).