Hmm hmm. This isn't easy. So I'll name a book, and then its author. Wait, no, that won't work. A bunch of books and their author. We'll do this elimination style.

Where to start? Ah. Douglas Coupland. Does modernity get any better than this guy? Most notable for: Girlfriend in A Coma; All Families Are Psychotic; Generation X.

He's just so good. He can take a realistic tale, make it fantastic, and have it say so much about the world; and all the while, the characters speak to you. Girlfriend in A Coma is him dabbling with the fantastic, but the way he does it is so beautiful, and speaks volumes. Throughout his characters stay real. None of them really grow into the situation except the one who slept through it all. The book is a wake-up call. The song is cool too. All Families Are Psychotic is Coupland taking a repeated theme of his (family) and performing magic with it. You can't help but smile with every twist and turn. The thing about this one is that it remains wholly grounded in reality, but is still absurd; but never so absurd as to be beyond belief. Generation X is a giant metaphor lived out through the lives of several loveable symbols, and it really opened my head up when I first read it. Love it.

Hmm. Lydia Millet, for: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart; How The Dead Dream.

Oh Pure And Radiant Heart blows my head off every single time I read it. It just has so much to say about so many things, and it's so subtle; the way relationships are played out like dried fried eggs on a dirty plate, how history is three deranged and lost scientists, how resolution is a sky full of rare cranes. I love her writing style too. Coupland writes like he's talking to you, and is one of the few authors out there who can really make that work - he doesn't sound like he's writing, he sounds like he's telling a story. Millet meantwhile appears to know that she could never pull that off, and so she tells us the story in her own, utterly beautiful, voice. It's a little quirky and jumpy at times, but her appreciation for a beautiful phrase amazes me, and I love her work for it.

Charles Bukowski. For: Pulp; Factotum; Women.

Normally, I hate poetry. When it's Bukowski, I love it. However, the above mentioned titles are novels. As a man, Bukowski was a miser, an alcoholic, an abuser, a womaniser - I do not, unlike others I know, glorify that shit. I understand that sitting in a room with him probably wouldn't really have been an experience.

The thing about him is the glimmer. Through his booze and drugs, there appears in his work (which is pretty much entirely autobiographical, apart from Pulp, which has space aliens) an occaisional paragraph which really grabs you. Be it a scene where he's sitting in his shitty downtown room, next to the L-train, watching the dead faces go by and wondering about life, or a day in his postman life where he realises that for every crap person there is a crap job, there's a definite something there. I've often thought that were he sober, he'd be Vonnegut 2; but the fact of the matter is that he was an alcoholic and a streetcrawler. Horrible as it sounds, I'm glad he was, because it gave the world the novels he wrote. I get the feeling that he wouldn't begrudge that either.

Oh yeah - I'm in love with Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like actually. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov.

I don't get why people don't like his books. Each one is home to collections of the most ****ed-up characters you will ever meet. I'm serious. Not one person in any of his books that I've read hasn't been flawed to death in the best way ever. I mean, take the basic plot of Crime and Punishment. People think it's boring because a student kills an old lady and then has The Biggest Guilt Trip of All Time. However, what they don't seem to notice is the surrounding DRAMA. I mean, Raskolnikov gettin' it on with impoverished prostitute while he dad screws around town? His sister and mum coming to make sure he's not completely unhinged (which he actually is but it's not like they notice) and succeeding merely in getting it on with Raskolnikov's best pal and worrying lots and eating lots of soup and chasing their mental family for money because they came to the city to help Raskolnikov in possession of nothing and so...get it? Soap operas owe SO MUCH to this guy.

Also, I like him because he succeeded in conning the entire literary establishment. Sure, he writes about lofty topics, God, morality, guilt, the future of humanity - but nobody's about to deny that there's a lot of rambling around in between. This is because my darling Fyodor was paid by the page; admist Pushkin worship he sent the literati off to scour these pages, essentially filled with what Dostoevsky last saw while drunk on the streets of St. Petersburg, for weighty metaphors and meanings. There aren't any. There's just insanity. And I love it.

Let's see. Margaret Atwood. Christ, where to begin. She seems to just get prizes for waking up these days. However, they're not without reason - The Handmaid's Tale; The Blind Assassin; Oryx and Crake.

Atwood is...well, untouchable. I hate her poetry, but her prose never fails to get me. I'm desperate to re-read Oryx and Crake, but I felt compelled to send it to a friend in America and haven't seen it since. I can still remember my favourite passages by heart. The Blind Assassin is a book that operates on so many levels - the story is relatively quiet, but there is so much going on. Atwood doesn't waste a scene, a sentence, a word; she's an artist like that. And, well, The Handmaid's Tale...what can I say? I first read this years ago, before its recent popularity. I haggled with my English teacher in the Academy to let me write about it; I was amazed that she'd never even heard of it.

Atwood captures what I love most; she takes the fantastic and places it squarely within the realm of reality. Her conceptions of the future are meaningful, beautiful, and always done with her own signature style. She and Coupland are proof that Canada can be absolved its myriad crimes against music through its massive contributions to literature.

Speaking of insanity placed within reality as a metaphor - ladies and gentlemen, Haruki Murakami. Oh yes. Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Norwegian Wood.

You know who I hate? I hate people who think that Norwegian Wood is Murakami's best book. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's superb - it just has such competition.

Murakami is a strange one. Every book of his that I've read is a heady mix of the utterly mundane, the utterly insane, and the relentlessly curious. All of this spattered with bizarre references to Western media. His style is very individual; I love what he writes because he never gets bogged down by trying to write. He's a little like Coupland in that respect - he doesn't **** you around, he just tells you the story. Another thing I like about him is his willingness to approach a single issue and write a book about it - he doesn't tend to be expansive. Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World could be about a million different things, but in the end there's only really one theme, and it is choice, something apparent in other Murakami works.

He is one of my favourites, but I do have a love-hate relationship with his work. I can and do love the stories and their messages to death - and yet, they piss me off. I've never quite been sure why. The things that piss me off most in books are meandering and meaninglessness, but he doesn't suffer from either of those. Perhaps with more reading I'll be able to pin it down.

There are lots more. But I've already spewed enough shit for now