The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Heartbreak in a jar, pretty much. I'm not giving the game away if I tell you (since I'm pretty sure it says this in the blurb) that this is Joan Didion's account of the year following the day when, as her daughter lie in a coma, her husband died. Smack down.

Joan and her husband John appear to be some kind of Gatsby-esque caricatures - writers, living in New York, with tales of having flown between cities to have dinner together when working apart - and there's enough socialite name-dropping in this book to put some glossy magazines to shame, but this is one of the most tender accounts of a marriage I have ever read.

We can't know what it is to grieve for and mourn a spouse without having done it - a sentiment Didion herself expresses, saying:
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death."
- but I strongly suspect this is the most lucid, illuminating account of such an experience I'm likely to come across.

Cheerfully, her latest book, Blue Nights, was written following the death of her daughter, in case you're interested in a double whammy. I, for one, am going to have to let that one alone for a while...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

It has been a long while since I devoured a book in a day; I can put this down to having a full time job, busy weekends and it being a rarity that a book comes along that is that good. The literary planets aligned, and I found myself splayed on the couch for many, many hours, pretending I was a uni student, or a sullen teenager. Oh those were the days Cockatoo Mobile Library!

So what is this book about? It’s about time (the title’s ‘goon’), getting older, getting wiser, getting dumber, things you did in your youth and the things you do in your old age, regrets, disappointments, with the loose framework of music linking it all back in together. There is a chapter written entirely in the form of a Powerpoint presentation, and it is a delight. You won’t believe me until you read it yourself. It has a surprising turn of phrase: "the sun felt like it had teeth". The last chapter confounded me a little – I liked what she was trying to achieve, but not sure if she quite got there. But I’ve always been a stroppy ending reader – when I read a really good book, they could end it perfectly and I’d still be grumpy that the whole enterprise was over.

Over to you Hammill…see if you agree with the Pulitzer jury.

The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do

This book won some major publishing prize this year for being one of the highest selling locally written books of the year, and while the writing is pretty basic, the story (and the humour with which it’s told) is quite extraordinary. Anh is an Australian-Vietnamese comedian, who came into the cultural lexicon via a few spots on Rove and Dancing with the Stars, which he won, and became an instant celeb (I was overseas at this time so kind of missed this crucial profile building period). But it seems that for a time, Australians were happy to embrace this Vietnamese looking, Aussie sounding guy because he was funny and non-threatening.

And this is where Anh has snuck under the radar by telling what is a really shocking and devastating boat family story, coated it in gags and Australians have lapped it up – kind of like sneaking vegetables onto the plate and making you like them without knowing you’re eating them. This is a GREAT thing, and there’s even talk of it being compulsory reading for early high schoolers. But while this book is being lauded as one of the best of 2011, we still have the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph howling about sending back the boats on their front pages. Go figure.

I loved Anh’s sweet and unwavering positivity, and belief that he can do anything he sets his mind to – from studying law to being a comedian to wooing his best friend from uni and having three sons, winning a bundle of money for charity on TV – there’s no idea too big or too silly to have a crack at. He’s a massive dag and there is absolutely no pretension to the writing at all. It definitely put a smile on my dial.

A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

Ok, yes: in some respects, this is a poor man's Midnight's Children, but I'll take it. It's about the birth of Bangladesh / the death of East Pakistan, the characters are a bit wonderful, the setting is so well drawn that I think I could probably direct a rikshaw from the house to the university and the love story elements are so intoxicating that for the 6 hours you'll spend reading this book, you'll be enraptured. Simples.

In truth, I only got this because I read an article about the author's new book, The Good Muslim, about which Helen Garner said:
"What a superb novel. Its delicacy and power and breadth -- the way its compassion and grief keep complicating its anger -- I read it with heart in mouth."
and this one was cheap on ebay. And, on the strength of this, her first novel, I'm going to have to fork out for the new 2011 model. Stay tuned.

Sum by David Eagleman

It took me ages to read this book of forty short stories, because it bent my mind into the kind of shapes you see yogis doing and think, "I wonder whether that's broken, or just dislocated?".

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and these are his forty musings on the afterlife. In some stories, there's a hint of science, but generally, it's completely fictitious. I first heard about this book when they read one of the stories on RadioLab (possibly you can hear the interview and a couple of stories in the link below (if I've done this right?!) from about 6.37 minutes to 11 minutes and 40 minutes to 43 minutes. Do it.

It's hard to think about being not alive, and in a sense, who cares? but also, who can help but wonder? About 50% of all religious belief systems it seems are focused on this very question - offering followers a kind of insurance/backstage pass kind of thing - and through time we have had amazing musings on the whole thing. I saw some maps at the British Library a few years ago that included these incredible celestial maps that included realms of the afterlife - we're kind of obsessed with it, as a species.

Anyway, so the book: Amazing bite-sized pieces of mind-bending incredible-acious-ness. Ok, I made up that word, maybe, but this guy invented Gods, so making up words kind of seems like a misdemeanor...

Also, I may have found my eulogy. Or yours. Guess it depends who pops 'em first. I'll dog mark the page so you know, just in case.