Books that will keep you indoors
Cycling down the Silk Road, a juicy thriller, activist history, recipes and racial politics
Book review › Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road By: Kate Harris Random House | $29.95 (Available now)
Let’s face it, this winter has been a bit of a soggy bummer, so it’s understandable as spring is upon us that you may want to celebrate by burning an umbrella. But take a breath and remember, just because the crocuses are out and dogs are no longer wearing jackets, that doesn’t mean you should rush outdoors like you’re leading a prison break.
The ease into spring can be tricky and should be thought out. For instance, don’t even think about putting away your winter clothes until the last snow is gone from atop Grouse Mountain. Please don’t jinx it for the rest of us.
That said, while you wait for the North Shore Mountains to dry out a bit, you can get some reading done. Here are five books by B.C.-based authors that will successfully help you pass the time.
Leading the way is Kate Harris’s memoir, Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road (Random House and available now).
A modern-day explorer, Rhodes Scholar and Oxford graduate, Harris has always dreamed of going to Mars. In the meantime, she quenched her explorer soul with journeys, goals and adventures.
In Lands of Lost Borders, the focus is on Harris’s cycling adventure along the famed ancient trade route, the Silk Road, with her friend Mel Yule. The pair did a short Silk Road stretch before Harris chased her academic pursuits. But once Oxford and MIT were behind her, Harris reunited with pal Yule and they headed out to ride the full Silk Road. The result is a unique and multi-layered travelogue that has the writer discovering remote landscapes as well as herself.
Harris’s wandering and wondering spirit has always been there. From the time she was a little kid she had her nose in books reading about explorers and her head in the clouds dreaming about becoming a Mars-bound astronaut.
“Part of my interest in Mars is because I had written Earth off,” said Harris, looking back to her youth. “I hadn’t seen much of the planet as a little kid and what I saw around me was pretty pained and fenced and nothing like the world described by the explorers I’d admired. If anything, I think this book is about falling in love with this world and getting a different perspective on it and realizing that there is so much wildness, wonder and mystery and generosity and goodness still on this planet that it is worth throwing all our weight into keeping it going.”
A bit of background on Harris: She was named one of Canada’s top-100 modern-day explorers by Canadian Geographic and was picked as one of the top-10 adventurers by Explore magazine. Her award-winning nature and travel writing has been featured in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic Travel, Sidetracked and The Georgia Review.
While Harris has a deep magazine-writing career, Lands of Lost Borders is her first book.
“It was a hugely daunting project to undertake. Trying to do justice to all the places we went through and the people we encountered along the way and sifting through the dailiness of a trip, it was hard,” said Harris of the project.
Sifting through the information and memories was also part of a stepping back, forest-for-the-trees exercise for Harris.
“It really took some distance from the trip to sift through my impressions from it, and to pull out the bigger impact of it. So you can remember more than sore legs and potholed roads,” said Harris.
An Ontario native, Harris has lived in Atlin since she fell in love with the tiny northwestern B.C. town while doing research on the nearby Juneau Ice Field in 2012. These days she and her partner live pretty much off the grid in a solar-powered cabin. The isolated, small town on the edge of the whole wide world is Harris’s happy place. More than a month or so in a big city and she admits she gets a bit itchy.
“I love looking out at a landscape where people are not the dominant presence,” said Harris about her Atlin vista. “Because it is at the end of a dead-end road you have hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of land doing its own thing or animals doing their own thing in every direction. That is pretty awesome.”
What is also awesome is this very-accessible book. It’s not bogged down with academic writing or pronouncements. It’s an engaging, entertaining memoir that could possibly inspire another little girl who thinks Charles Darwin and Alexandra David-Néel are way more interesting than Kylie Jenner and Justin Bieber.
“I’d be thrilled if I inspired young gals to get out and see the world,” said Harris. “Even look at their backyard in different ways, that would be amazing.”
Best of the rest THE RULE OF STEPHENS By: Timothy Taylor Doubleday Canada | $22.95 (Available now)
After surviving a plane crash, a successful woman named Catherine starts to wonder if her good luck and good fortune have all been used up in a bid to save her life. A late-night phone call from another crash survivor who confesses to a life in tatters doesn’t help her shake her emotional and otherworldly thoughts and return her to the land of logic.
Taylor, whose breakout 2001 novel, Stanley Park, was a big hit, has this time delivered a story that is part literary fiction and part juicy thriller. Bottom line, it’s a page-turner.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF STRUGGLES: THE HISTORY OF WOMEN AND THE VOTE IN CANADA By: Joan Sangster UBC Press | $27.95 (Available March 8)
Now this is one of those books you need to read and you need to buy for others, especially now as women are facing watershed moments on many fronts.
In this fantastic book, acclaimed historian Joan Sangster celebrates the 100th anniversary of Canadian women getting the vote not with rah, rah speeches and pleasantries, but with looks at the real warriors and the real struggles women faced. From Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s mid-19th century demands for equal rights for women and Blacks, to struggles and steps that it took for First Nations women to finally get the vote in the 1960s, this comprehensive book truly reminds the reader of what determination and dedication can do.
THE WICKANINNISH COOKBOOK: RUSTIC ELEGANCE ON NATURE’S EDGE By: Joanne Sasvari Random House | $45 (Available May 8)
Since 1996, Tofino’s jewel of a hotel, the Wickaninnish Inn, has been wowing visitors with its beautiful setting between oldgrowth forest and the Pacific Ocean.
Included in the posh, edge-ofthe-world experience is The Pointe Restaurant. A foodies delight, it delivers innovative, elegant and, at the same time, perfectly comfortable West Coast cuisine. Oh and the view. Wow. Tip: Get a just-before-sunset reservation.
This new cookbook is packed with recipes from current and former chefs Warren Barr, Rod Butters, Matthias Conradi, Mark Filatow, Justin Laboissiere, Duncan Ly, Andrew Springett and Matt Wilson.
I’VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU: A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER By: David Chariandy Random House | $19.95 (Available May 29)
After his huge success with his 2017 Giller Prize longlisted novel, Brother, Chariandy is back with an intimate look into the politics of race today. He does this through a letter to his now-13-year-old daughter.
The son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, Chariandy mines his own, as well as his ancestral, past. Topics of slavery, immigration and his experiences of being a visible minority are at the heart of this book.
Chariandy offers up questions that are not just important to himself, or are profound learning experiences for his daughter, but questions that we should all take time to think about and address. This new book has been compared with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.
That’s a good thing.