The Toronto Book Awards Committee announced the finalists for the Toronto Book Awards yesterday, highlighting five titles that “evoke the spirit of Toronto.” The finalists for the award all feature Toronto extensively in their works, and the winner of the award will receive over $10,000 in prize money.

Last year’s winner, Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis, was a collection of short stories that originally appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper’s, and were all brought together by a cohesive narrative revolving around a newly arrived family of Russian Jews to Toronto. The stories portrayed a side of Toronto that was often ignored, yet still resonated with Torontonians everywhere through their vivid descriptions of city life. Bezmozgis’ collection and his stories went on to win various other awards.

While none of this year’s finalists capture Toronto in the impressive way that Bezmozgis was able to paint the urban landscape, there’s still quite a treasure chest of literature being showcased at this year’s awards.

Howard Akler’s The City Man, which looks at Toronto in the 1930s, is a compelling read and does a great job of showcasing city life most of us were to young to remember, but falls short of Akler’s previous contribution to the Unknown City project, where he really explores the Toronto that we all know and love, but is often ignored by tourists.

M.G. Vassanji’s When She Was Queen demonstrates the two-time Giller Prize winner’s deftness with the language, but this collection of short stories lags when it comes to looking at Toronto. Instead, his most vivid descriptions revolve around his East African and Gujarati locales. Vassanji’s earlier collection of short stories — Uhuru Street — that revolves around his time in his home city of Dar es Salaam (which also happens to be my own birthplace, so I may be a bit biased) is much more nuanced.

Of the three nominated titles I have read, Wilcox and McBride’s uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto is clearly my favorite, and that’s no surprise: it is a collection of essays on visions of Toronto by a multitude of influential Torontonians. Sure, the essays rarely venture north of Bloor, the attached maps leave out many parts of the current Toronto, and many of the visions are too safe to be noteworthy, but uTOpia will get people thinking about the city in ways they hadn’t before. John Lorinc’s essay on Toronto’s retail malls is particularly outstanding.

I haven’t read Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For yet, but her earlier work in poetry has been critically acclaimed, with her previous books winning the Griffin Prize and the Governor’s General Award. Brand’s nominated novel follows five second-generation Torontonians who are trying to make their way through life in the big city.

According to critics, Stephen Marche’s Raymond and Hannah is a “tale of two cities” that uses Toronto and Jerusalem as backdrops for a doomed romance and the conflict between geography, culture, and religion. I just added it to my hold list at TPL, and there are still about 200 holds for it in front of me to be filled.

The winner of the Toronto Book Awards will be announced on September 6, 2006, and all the finalists will be reading from their books during The Word on the Street festival in late September.

If there’s one thing Toronto needs to do, it’s to capitalize on the enthusiasm people have about the somewhat-deficient transit system. Aside from all the fighting between the union and the commission, there’s a core group of TTC enthusiasts in this city, all of whom love the transit system for all it can be.

One of those enthusiasts, Miguel Syapp, has posted a vision of his fantasy subway system for Toronto, and unlike NC Duong’s fantasy map from last year, Syapp’s vision is not only much more effective, but also details the steps of building such a system through various phases. Exciting, not only because it makes Toronto look much more connected, but also because I’d have a subway stop next to my home by phase 9.

(Syapp’s gone over his bandwidth because of the popularity his map is getting, so James Bow has mirrored the site over at Transit Toronto. Check it out there if you can’t access Syapp’s original site.)

Now, I’m the first to admit that building so many subway routes is close to impossible, and definitely not feasible, but instead of discarding Syapp’s plans altogether, it may make sense to see if any of the proposed lines could be built as LRT routes. It is time that Howard Moscoe and the rest of the commission stop bickering with the union and stop trying to quell citizen engagement with TTC policy, and instead listen to the swarms of TTC enthusiasts that only want the TTC to acheive the amazing potential it has.

There’s some good discussion over on Spacing Wire and Torontoist about the map, if you have something to say.