Add these great reads to your holiday wish list
From local lore to epic adventure, here's a roundup of great books worth adding to your holiday gift list
As we continue to make our way through these pandemic times, we are all looking for a break. And books can be just the ticket to some time away from this abysmal year.
Hot-ticket reads during the holidays are often memoirs, and this year is no exception, as some bold type names are topping the bestsellers and best gift lists this holiday season.
If you haven't heard, Barack Obama has a new book. Part one of his memoir, A Promised Land is on track to be the year's biggest seller. It seems the calm, cool of No. 44 in the U.S. presidential roll call is something folks are interested in.
The other thing people seem to be seeking out is some form of optimism — and who is more optimistic than Dolly Parton and Michael J. Fox?
Parton, the woman behind a gazillion hit songs — who we learned recently has donated $1 million toward research for a COVID-19 vaccine — has pulled together pictures, memories and song lyrics for the lovely and big coffee table book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.
As for Burnaby boy Fox — yes he was born in Edmonton but we don't count that here — well he just released his fourth book the memoir No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality. A friend summed up the offering pretty well when she said it was an easy, uplifting read that does not require you to know anything about Alex P. Keaton or Marty Mcfly.
In the spirit of adding good reads to your holiday gift giving, below is a small list of some titles worth wrapping up. If you do decide to give the gift of reading this holiday season please shop at a local bookstore. Bookstores all across this province have brilliantly upped their online game and most offer safe curbside pickup if you don't want to venture into a store.
B.C. AUTHORS THE LIBRARY OF LEGENDS Janie Chang | Harper Collins Canada
Vancouver-based historical fiction writer Janie Chang will really get your mind out of the house with this lush, magical and poetic set-inChina story of a group of Chinese university students who are forced to flee their school as the Japanese invasion of 1937 rumbles into their lives. On the road with the students is a very special and sacred collection of books — books that bring enlightenment, enchantment and even some danger. A great read for all, from teens to seniors.
BLUE SKY KINGDOM
Bruce Kirkby | Douglas & Mcintyre
Adventurer Bruce Kirkby has been on many impressive trips to far-flung places around the globe. But his most eye-opening, life-changing journey is captured in the memoir Blue Sky Kingdom. The interesting and thought-provoking book tells the story of Kirkby, his wife Christine and their kids Taj and Bodi, aged three and seven, as they immerse themselves in an epic adventure of trekking to the heart of the Himalaya. Dubbed a “slow,” journey, the family from Kimberley travels by shipping freighter, bus, train, riverboat and foot. In the end, we get a travel memoir with a huge heart and an even bigger understanding of the need for true, cross-culture human connection.
VANCOUVER EXPOSED
Eve Lazarus | Arsenal Pulp Press
This is one of those books that should be sitting around in the waiting rooms of dentists, doctors and hairstylists. Basically, it should be anywhere people might find 15 minutes on their hands. It also would fit quite nicely on a coffee table at home to give a guest — they will return, eventually — a quick and fabulously interesting look into Vancouver stories that are tantalizing, sometimes frustrating, occasionally funny and always revelatory. Nudist camps, buried houses, long-forgotten tunnels, burlesque theatres, forgotten art and even axe murders are just some of the eye-opening stories that will give a reader of this book an entertaining advantage in the conversation department when dinner parties return.
CANADIAN AUTHORS INDIAN SON VACATION
Thomas King |
Harper Collins Canada
Thomas King's deft dialogue skills leave the reader feeling like an expert eavesdropper as they listen in on conversations between husband and wife Bird and Mimi as they move around Prague. The pair is on a quest to follow postcards from 100 years ago sent by Mimi's Uncle Leroy when he left Canada for Europe with the family's medicine bundle. Having this story from the award-winning Guelph writer is a welcome break from the at-home day-to-day. Here with Bird and Mimi you vicariously get to travel. You get to sip coffee in a quaint café and you get to meet new people at breakfast. You get to wander down narrow allies and listen to other tourists talk. You get to forget that the last exciting thing you did was edit your sock drawer.
HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE Souvankham Thammavongsa | Penguin Random House
This short story collection just won the Giller Prize for Souvankham Thammavongsa. A writer of four books of poetry, this marks the Toronto writer's first work of fiction. The collection is made up of 14 diverse stories about the day-to-day lives of immigrants, mostly refugees. Men, women and children narrate the stories that deliver all the feels. Thammavongsa, who was born in the (Lao) Nong Khai refugee camp in Thailand and was raised and educated in Toronto, writes about hope, disappointment, love, desperation and pretty much all of the human condition, including the need to belong. Her prose is unadorned but beautifully emotive. This, like Vancouver Exposed, is a perfect book for our short attention span times. Set it out, pick it up, read a story, repeat.
RIDGERUNNER
Gil Adamson | House of Anansi Press
This followup to the gripping 2007 novel The Outlander has Toronto writer Gil Adamson — recent winner of 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and finalist for the Giller Prize — transporting readers back to the world of The Outlander, a dozen years after the events of the first book. As the First World War rages on in Europe, back here in North America the notorious thief William Moreland, a.k.a. the ridgerunner, is again on the move and heading to collect his 12-yearold son who, since the death of his mother, has been in the care of a nun who has kept young Jack locked up in her big house. This literary western is one of those can't-put-it-down kind of books.
Douglas Stuart | Grove Atlantic
First-time novelist and former fashion designer Douglas Stuart spent 10 years writing this novel based on his own life growing up gay with an alcoholic mother in Thatcher-era economically flattened Glasgow. As the saying goes, the wait was worth it, as Shuggie Bain has been heralded around the globe and recently was awarded the Booker Prize, the leading literary award in the English language. Shuggie is a sweet and lonely boy living with his mom and two siblings in rundown public housing in a city overrun by unemployment and a drug epidemic. Shuggie's mother dreams of more, but alcohol drowns those dreams and in turn drives two of her children away, leaving Shuggie trying to help her survive while trying to navigate his own increasingly complicated life.
A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES
Ian Rankin | Orion
Another Scottish author gets the nod, but while Stuart is fresh into the game, veteran crime novel writer Ian Rankin is back with a new John Rebus mystery — his 23rd. This time, Rankin's rumpled, often irascible, rock 'n' roll-loving Edinburgh detective gets a latenight call from his daughter telling him her husband has gone missing. Not known for his fatherly skills, Rebus finds himself trying to balance being a dad and a detective. Fans will be happy to know familiar faces — gangster Ger Cafferty and copper Siobhan Clarke — are well in this story that weaves together two mysteries.
A BURNING
Megha Majumdar | Knopf
This is another debut novel that has left readers and the literary intelligentsia going “wow.” Indian/american New Yorker Megha Majumdar's story is set in India and revolves around three characters from different backgrounds — a destitute Muslim girl, a gym teacher and an outcast with Bollywood ambitions — each with the same aspirational ambitions to rise up into the middle class. With a different route and plan, each is equally determined to keep stepping forward despite the endless roadblocks. Majumdar's writing clicks along at a pace that could easily lead a reader to devour this vibrant story in one sitting.