My reading list for the next three to six years

Courtesy of The Globe and Mail's list of the top fiction from 2008. Time to dust off that library card - none of these is exactly cheap.

I will never make it through all of these, but a girl can dream, right?

In other news, the "long list" for the 2009 Giller Award came out earlier this week. (And in a truly cringe-worthy show of irony, the Globe's copy editors didn't catch the misspelling of the word "chromosome" in the headline of their Books blog.)

Here are this year's finalists for your viewing (and reading-list-making) pleasure. Of the 12 authors chosen, only two are men, which is extremely unusual. I like Scowen's three possible conclusions from this information; my gut says it's a mix between #2 and #3.

Margaret Atwood for The Year of the Flood

Martha Bailie for The Incident Report

Kim Echlin for The Disappeared

Claire Holden Rothman for The Heart Specialist

Paulette Jiles for The Color of Lightning

Jeanette Lynes for The Factory Voice

Annabel Lyon for her novel The Golden Mean

Linden MacIntyre for his novel The Bishop’s Man

Colin McAdam for Fall

Anne Michaels for The Winter Vault

Shani Mootoo for Valmiki’s Daughter

Kate Pullinger for The Mistress Of Nothing

**Edited to add:
Apparently it's highly appropriate for me to be nitpicking the Globe for its spelling errors on today of all days. September 24th is National Punctuation Day. May the so-called "language-arts fusspots" unite!