As we say goodbye to 2008 - the year of Barack Obama, Carla Bruni and Guns N' Roses - I've come up with a list of books that I'm going to remember just as fondly, my favourites of the year that was.

First up: JonArno Larson's A Voweller's Bestiary (Porcupine's Quill). It might be juvenile poetry but only because it's so much fun.

On the other end of the poetry spectrum, but equally funny in its own way, is 8x8x7 (Krupskaya) by Winnipeg's Colin Smith: observations about the crumbling, unfair world that surrounds us, with bitterness tempered by compassion. 

Lady Lazarus (Harcourt), a ridiculously ambitious debut novel by one-time alternative-rock DJ Andrew Foster Altschul, is about a dead rock star, his media-sensation daughter and her would-be biographer, someone named Andrew Altschul.

Another fine and ambitious debut novel is The Toss of a Lemon (Random House Canada) by Padma Viswanathan, a book which beautifully (and effortlessly) opens a window on the life of a Brahmin widow. Because of the depth of the characterizations, it never feels like a history lesson.

Portugal's Jose Saramago, a Nobel Prize winner, shows us why he's one of the great writers of the world with his latest book, Death With Interruptions (Harcourt; translated by Margaret Jull Costa). Opening words: "The following day, no one died."

And speaking of Nobel Prize winners, Peter Carey never disappoints. Latest proof: His Illegal Self (Random House Canada), a novel concerning a maternal love story between the child of domestic terrorists and an unwilling nursemaid.

No one does dysfunctional family like Miriam Toews. The Flying Troutmans (Knopf Canada) doesn't feature Mennonites but does include a funny-sad road trip.

I also loved Maggie Helwig's Girls Fall Down (Coach House Books) - a beautiful, strange novel about paranoia, lost love, family bonds and the Toronto subway.

Kevin Brockmeier offers surreal stories in The View From the Seventh Layer (Pantheon), in which one askew moment threatens the world with chaos.

Mormons of one sort or another have been under the microscope all year for all sorts of reasons. Daphne Bramham's The Secret Lives of the Saints (Random House Canada) looks at a bizarre offshoot of Mormons, a creepy sect of child brides and lost boys that managed to find a home in the British Columbia countryside.

Pascal Blanchet employs a duo-tone retro look for his graphic social history White Rapids (Drawn & Quarterly; translated by Helge Dascher), the nostalgic story of a factory town whipped up in the 1920s to house hydro workers in rural Quebec.

Closer to home, Winnipeg is again the setting for Michael Van Rooy's Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal (Ravenstone), the second in the hugely readable series featuring hard-boiled ex-con/do-gooder Monty Haaviko. An unlikely hometown hero.