It’s that time again – the end of the year means plenty of Books of the Year lists. This year is extra-annoying special, as the end of 2009 marks the end of a decade. While these lists can often be unimaginative, two caught this Books@Torontoist’s editor’s eye: Paste’s top ten debut novels of the decade and one of the Guardian’s books of the year list, compiled by notable people like Nick Hornby, Malcolm Gladwell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vivenne Westwood, and Sam Mendes.

Shaka! Actors, musicians and those famous-for-being-famous types love dabbling in industries like fragrances, fashion and publishing. Only a brave few step up to the plate (pun intended) and publish a cook book. Cookin’ with Coolio includes culinary delights like “Cold Shrimpin’,” “Banana Ba-ba-ba-bread” and “Pasta Like a Rasta.”

Meet the 101 most influential people who never lived. Santa Claus deserves top-five props (he’s #3), but how does Buffy the Vampire Slayer peak at #44? She could easily take Alice in Wonderland (#34) and Prince Charming (#20).

Forensic artist Barbara Anderson sketched eight scary literary criminals for the November/December issue of Believer magazine. You have to pick up their latest issue to see all the sketches, but Boston.com teases us with sketches of McCarthy’s Judge Holden and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov.

Paranormal romance author Lynn Viehl, whose book Twilight Fall made the mass market paperback New York Times bestseller list, shared her royalty statements with the world this week in an online article. It turns out that landing on a title on the coveted NYT list doesn’t always land an author with a condo in the sky and a house in the Hamptons.

Sarah Palin must be in the holiday spirit: her train wreck of a book just keeps on giving. Today, we have two lovely bits of news: The Associated Press compiled a list of errors found in Going Rogue and let’s just say that the list is extensive. Since Palin’s book is index free, Slate decided to whip one up for us. Torontoist’s favorite entry? “Russia, proximity of Alaska to, 275; map proving it, pre-index page.”

In 1944, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the Wehrmacht troops during the Rhineland Campaign, and became a prisoner of war. During this time he wrote his family a letter, telling them about his capture, and now that letter is available to read on the excellent Letters of Note site.

Comic Book Resources compiled the 75 most iconic DC Covers of All Time. The covers are posted in no particular order, so don’t get riled up if you think Watchmen deserves to be higher. If you do get riled up, take your cause to the Internet!

And finally, it’s no big secret that some good books contain a lot of bad sex – or bad sex writing, that is. The Literary Review announced the shortlist for it’s bad sex in fiction award. Paul Theroux, Nick Cave and Philip Roth all scored nominations on this year’s roll call, but it’s interesting to not that of the ten shortlisted authors only one woman, Sanjida O’Connell, wrote steamy passages bad enough to rank with the boys. The winner will be announced November 30.

Terry Fox. The Spanish Influenza. John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Vimy Ridge. The Last Spike. Bob and Doug McKenzie. Wayne Gretzky. Nellie McClung. Winnie the Bear. The Halifax Explosion. The moments and people that define Canada are as diverse and wide-ranging as the country itself. No wonder Beaver editor Mark Reid had such a difficult time selecting photos for 100 Photos That Changed Canada.

At the Indigo at Bay and Bloor on Monday night, Reid sat down with CBC personality Don Newman to talk about the Beaver’s first-ever foray into book publishing, a compilation of Canada’s most influential photographs. The one hundred photos selected span 1847 to 2008 and cover political and natural disasters, gold medals won and lost, moments of inspiration, moments of desperation, and more.

“100 Photos That Changed Canada is a cocky and brash title,” Reid readily admits. “However, we were looking for photos that held such power they made us rethink who were are as people and as a nation.”

Continue Reading: Changing Canada, One Photo At A Time on the main Torontoist site

Now in its second year, The Best Canadian Poetry in English series has a simple premise: annual Guest Editor reads a year’s worth of Canadian lit mags, selects the best 100 poems therein, whittles these down to 50, and Tightrope Books prints up a tidy little anthology. No problem, right?

Selecting the “best” in a year of Canadian poetry is a fraught, laborious task, and the audacity of the project is lost neither on Series Editor Molly Peacock or on this year’s Editor A.F. Moritz. In fact, Best Canadian Poetry in English is proving to be equally concerned with printing the year’s top 50 poems as it is with documenting the difficult process of selecting them. These documentary elements – the inventory of contact information for the magazines considered, the dutiful list of the 50 poems that didn’t make the final cut – are both celebratory (How lovely you all are; How hard everyone has worked) and a little bit apologetic (Dear lit mags, we’re sorry that Stephen Harper has a bit of hate-on for you; Dear long-listed poets, we’re truly heartbroken that we couldn’t print your work). Somebody has to say it: it’s all very Canadian.

Ultimately that works in the book’s favour. The project is, after all, not only about showcasing the particular 50 poems included but also about taking a snapshot of a community at work.  At the recent Toronto launch of the 2009 edition, A.F. Moritz expressed a hope that the collection function not as a précis of contemporary Canadian poetry but as a point of entry into a world that is sadly opaque to those not working in it.

Reviewing last year’s inaugural edition, Canadian poet and ubiquitous blogger rob mclennan (still lowercase after all these years) remarked that if the collection is going to showcase Canadian talent abroad then little ole’ Tightrope might not be the publisher for it. But with a successful New York launch under its belt and plans for a similar release in London next year, Tightrope is proving itself up to the project’s scope.  As for the range of literary journals considered, the second edition has expanded there, too, raising the bar by 20 mags plus the inclusion of online work in addition to print. No small feat.

It’s so obvious that it’s almost not worth saying: not everyone is going to love this anthology.  For one thing, it uses literary journals exclusively as the measure of poetry’s pulse, an editorial decision likely to elicit protestations of gate keeping and naysaying from the self-publishing crowd. The avant-garde folks, too, are not going to see much of themselves reflected in this collection and may send up a clamour. Let’s hope that they do. The further the project goes toward generating conversation about Canadian poetry, the better.

Here’s one quibble that no one seems to have yet voiced: what’s with the title? Shouldn’t this be the subtitle to something a little bit snappier?  And it must be the qualifier “in English” tagged onto the end (PC recognition that people speak French in this country: check), but it sounds like an awkward translation from another language.

All the same, we look forward to seeing where Best Canadian Poetry takes us. Next year, the project looks to the West coast with incoming Editor Lorna Crozier.