I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys and it is my favourite book of 2006. I know there’s still a lot of the year left but honestly I can’t imagine what its contenders could do to knock it from the top of my charts.

Anansi Boys is about two brothers: Fat Charlie Nancy and Spider Nancy. Fat Charlie is totally embarrassed by his father, who seems to be a free-wheeling, lady charmer. Fat Charlie puts a whole ocean between himself and dad. He moves to London and is engaged to Rosie. Rosie finds out that he has a father and wants him invited to the wedding. Fat Charlie has no contact info for his dad so he has to call up a long-time neighbour, Callyanne Higgler. Turns out dad is dead and Charlie needs to come home to Florida for the funeral. While he and Higgler are cleaning out dad’s house, she mentions that Charlie has a brother and if he wants to talk to him he only needs to speak to a spider. Ya right.

For very funny, drunken reasons Charlie does happen to be talking to a garden spider and says hey if you see my brother tell him to drop by. Indeed the next day Spider appears and quite quickly gets Charlie in bed with another woman, gets him investigated by the police for fraud, steals his girlfriend, and has him making deals with the bird woman.

Turns out dad is a god and Spider has god-like qualities too. They each are A Nancy. Fat Charlie is a nancy in the British sense of the word. Dad is Anansi the Spider of the African/Caribbean folktales. Spider is a spin-off (ha ha ha). Anyway, this novel is magical the way that The Time Traveler’s Wife or Our Lady of the Lost and Found is magical. The magic and fantasy are part of the story, but the writing is not what people typically imagine when they think “fantasty writing”.

The Time Traveler’s Wife and Our Lady of the Lost and Found were previous years’ top favourites so I’m now starting to see a trend with my own reading that I never saw before. Thank you blog.

In short, if you have not read Neil Gaiman or The Anansi Boys, get out and read this book. It’s beyond fantastic.

Amazon.ca has an excerpt of the first chapter if you need to peruse of the writing. And here’s the Wikipedia entry for Anansi in case you’ve never heard of the west African trickster Anansi.