Hilarious, Dazzling, Triumphant: All I Want for Christmas Is Books

At The Tyee, we regularly share art that delights us across the team. This year, those included the Tiny Desk concert by Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, the Vancouver Public Library’s impressive acting chops and the Onion’s purchase of Alex Jones’ Infowars with the goal of making it “very funny, very stupid” (we consider that art).

Our sharing includes books, of course. Lots of them, handed gladly across our desks to each other. As part of an annual addition, we’ve gathered some of our faves in our 2024 holiday reading list — a list to inspire gifts for the ones you love, and maybe even a few for you, too.

We’d love to hear about what’s lifting your spirits this year, and what books you’d recommend giving as gifts this holiday season. Please share in the comments below.

For anyone trying to figure out what ‘success’ means in a culturally disjointed world

A Season in Chezgh’un
Darrel J. McLeod
(Douglas & McIntyre)

Released not long before author Darrel McLeod unexpectedly died much too young this past summer, this 2023 novel re-explores some terrain familiar from his memoirs Peyakow and Mamaskatch, the latter of which won a Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction.

In the novel he tells the story of a gay Cree man who leaves a stable and comfortable life teaching French immersion in Vancouver to become a school principal in a remote Dakelh community in northern B.C. that is similar enough to where he grew up to be familiar, but different enough that he arrives an outsider. The community is reeling from colonization, but contact was sufficiently recent that many still speak Dakelh and keep their traditional practices.

It’s a nuanced account of belonging, resilience and how to live in a broken world, and it doesn’t shy from hard truths.

For your friend moving away from Vancouver, and you’re both sad about it

Carts, Hedges, Lions
Taizo Yamamoto, with essays by Kevin Chong, Aaron Peck and Jackie Wong
(Figure 1)

Through meticulously rendered illustrations, Vancouver architect Taizo Yamamoto offers a delightfully unconventional guide to ubiquitous yet overlooked elements of the urban landscape. Yamamoto’s drawings focus on shopping carts loaded with the stuff of people’s lives, the mysterious hedges surrounding some Vancouver single-family homes, and the statuary lions at the gates of many others.

The result is a thoughtful meditation on class, race and life in the city. Yamamoto’s art is accompanied by essays by art writer Aaron Peck and Tyee senior editor Jackie Wong, plus a stunning work of short fiction by Vancouver author and creative writing professor Kevin Chong that will stop readers in their tracks.

For the definitive walk-through of Canadian housing history

Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis
Carolyn Whitzman
(UBC Press)

It might be surprising to learn that Carolyn Whitzman’s previous book was true crime with a social history: Clara at the Door with a Revolver: The Scandalous Black Suspect, the Exemplary White Son, and the Murder That Shocked Toronto. But crack open Home Truths and you’ll find that she’s a meticulous detective on a very different case: how did we end up with a housing crisis?

Whitzman, an urban geographer at the University of Toronto’s school of cities, is one of those scholars (and a self-admitted wonk) who knows how to make a potentially dense topic lively. Her book is a readable resource that offers a detailed walk-through of Canada’s history of innovative triumphs, failures we live with today and how we can fix this mess. This one’s going to be on the desk of our reporters covering housing. Whitzman’s challenge for decision-makers looking to tackle the problem seriously: “Who needs what kind of housing, where, and at what cost?”

For anyone just so over our polarizing approach to politics

At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage
Carol Off
(Penguin Random House Canada)

Discussing a controversial piece of legislation at the dinner table with family? Debating policy with friends? Feel like you're not even remotely on the same page as someone you love, but disagree with politically? Carol Off, now-retired host of CBC's As It Happens, has just the thing: her new book At a Loss for Words. Across six essays, the instant bestseller explores six selected words rife with political baggage — some being “freedom,” “choice” and “woke” — and goes through their history in Canada to find a grounded, shareable truth.

“I'm not saying we should be of one collective mind about anything,” writes Off, “but surely, we need the vocabulary to coherently disagree, to negotiate our way to some rational understanding, with reasonable people on all sides.” As Off told The Tyee earlier this fall, “As we enter this election period in Canada, we have to start understanding what’s true and what isn’t.”

For the parent-to-be

Special Topics in Being a Parent: A Queer and Tender Guide to Things I’ve Learned about Parenting, Mostly the Hard Way
S. Bear Bergman, illustrated by Saul Freedman-Lawson
(Arsenal Pulp Press)

Special Topics in Being a Parent, a graphic novel advice book written by S. Bear Bergman and illustrated by Saul Freedman-Lawson, offers parenting advice from Bergman’s perspective as a trans and queer Jewish man married with children.

The book covers a variety of parenting themes and situations, including how to introduce new foods to your kids; how to know if you want kids; how to get everyone out the door on time without crying; and how to acknowledge parenting mistakes, forgive yourself and move on.

The advice in Special Topics in Being a Parent challenges social norms, broadening ideas and approaches for raising children in ways that better reflect parents’ own values.

For fans of the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section

The Coincidence Problem: Selected Dispatches 1999-2022
Stephen Osborne
(Arsenal Pulp Press)

The Coincidence Problem brings together dispatches written by Stephen Osborne, originally published in Geist, the magazine he co-founded with his partner, Mary Schendlinger. In The Coincidence Problem, Osborne covers everything from civic monuments to family history to global terrorism to the lynching of Indigenous youth Louie Sam to end times in the Arctic — all done in a short, dryly funny observational style. Read an excerpt in which Osborne delves into a brief history of bombing in Vancouver.

For the parent whose kid inevitably ralphs on road trips

Adventures in Desolation Sound
Grant Lawrence, illustrated by Ginger Ngo
(Harbour)

Grant Lawrence is back with a kid-friendly adaptation of his memoir Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound. It all begins when Lawrence’s dad decides his kids are watching altogether too much television. The long, winding road up Highway 101 — complete with two ferry rides — ends with the solution to this problem: a new cabin in Desolation Sound. As the indoorsy kids become outdoorsy, they meet lots of interesting characters in their new summer digs.

For your cousin who’s thinking about taking a year off in the mountains

Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies
Amal Alhomsi
(Rocky Mountain Books)

Banff resident Amal Alhomsi uses his life in the mountains as the lens through which he explores big questions in his debut essay collection, Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies. An immigrant from Syria, Alhomsi is a writer, artist and environmental educator who has lived in Banff since 2018. His essays on life, death and rebirth follow the tradition of nature authors like Annie Dillard and Henry David Thoreau. His work is a welcome addition to a genre dominated by white authors — to learn from a racialized voice in these realms is as refreshing as it is surprising, even to Alhomsi himself.

“I never in my life imagined I would write about nature, or the mountains. I’ve always wanted to do political writing,” Alhomsi told The Tyee in September. He had moved to Banff in search of peace and an antidote to the political upheaval and climate anxiety he was witnessing. “Once you look at a mountain that’s so large and magnificent, you start thinking, ‘Nothing matters but this.’”

For your favourite tree lover

Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests
Diana Beresford-Kroeger
(Penguin Random House)

A book for the ages, and this age especially, poetic firebrand Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s Our Green Heart is a potent and powerful reminder that the world is a wild and mysterious place. If you needed any additional edification on this, just immerse yourself in Beresford-Kroeger’s magnificent prose. It’s a glittering trove of riches, with deep dives into everything from quantum physics to forest precognition. This woman is both an epic storyteller and a careful scientist, balancing close observations of the natural world with tales from her Irish childhood. It’s a giddy-making convergence, piled to the rafters with fascinating investigations, all leavened by the author’s fiery wit and good humour.

For your loved ones who are parents of biracial children

Real Americans
Rachel Khong
(Knopf)

San Francisco author Rachel Khong’s sophomore novel is an exquisitely rendered exploration of race, class and the role of choice in life’s most significant moments. Do we freely choose who we love, or are other forces at play? How have our parents and grandparents shaped who we are and what we think we want?

Real Americans begins on the cusp of the year 2000 in New York City, where 22-year-old Lily Chen wins a TV in a prize draw at a holiday party and a young man named Matthew helps her take it home. Their meet-cute incites a beautifully crafted exploration of desire, power and chance that spans three generations. The work is infused with a magic realism that reminds the reader why novels are great works of art.

For everyone stumbling through grief

The Work
Bren Simmers
(Gaspereau Press)

“The last time I was in an airport I ran / from one empty terminal to the next / looking for a time zone with my father / still in it,” Bren Simmers writes in The Work. Simmers’ father has just died; her mother is struggling with dementia; her sister-in-law has received a terminal cancer diagnosis. What shape can love take when things are wending towards their endings? Bren Simmers’ Governor General’s Literary Award-shortlisted book writes towards answering this question.

For the ‘boy moms’ in your life

Blessings
Chukwuebuka Ibeh
(Penguin Random House)

Everyone benefits from reading Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut novel Blessings, a moving examination of the rough journey to manhood for a queer boy and the precarity of his adult gay life in 2010s Nigeria. But that one mom (or, let’s be fair, dad) who salts conversations with “Boys will be boys” platitudes to excuse all manner of brash and assaultive behaviour from their male offspring would really benefit from Blessing’s broadening of what it means to be a “man.”

From birth, Uzoamaka knew her son Obiefuna was special. But where she marvels at his empathy and grace, others, including her husband, see a boy too “soft” and feminine for comfort. As society subjects Obiefuna to violence and shame, Uzoamaka must look beyond heteronormative dreams and love Obiefuna as he is. Blessings shows truly loving your child means celebrating their uniqueness, not forcing them into rigid gender stereotypes.

For your Alberta uncle who wants ‘freedom’ from Ottawa, carbon taxes and vaccine mandates

On Freedom
Timothy Snyder
(Crown)

“Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.” In other words, social structures create space for freedom, and without a society of equals the individual has no freedom. Get rid of the structures and Utopia won’t grow up in their place. Snyder writes clearly and eloquently — and persuasively. Your uncle may be quoting him next Christmas.

For the aspiring educator

Fierce, Fabulous and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity
LJ Slovin
(University of Regina Press)

Want to know what’s really going on in high schools these days? Teens tend to clam up around adults, so take it from author LJ Slovin, who spent a whole school year going to school with cis, trans and non-binary high school students in the Lower Mainland.

Their resulting book Fierce, Fabulous and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity features insights and complications from school administrators, teachers and students who are sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing to include and respect all students from a variety of backgrounds in an education system deeply divided along gender-binary lines.

For your friend in the throes of divorce while their peers are in seemingly happy partnerships

We Are Too Many: A Memoir [Kind of]
Hannah Pittard
(Macmillan)

A hot read at the height of brat summer was Chris Heath’s July 2024 feature in Vulture on literature, treachery and the unbelievable lives of writers. The story focused on four close friends comprising two couples. Everything turned upside down when one of them slept with his wife’s best friend. “Explosions like these are forever going off all around us, but you’d barely know,” Heath wrote. “Then there are writers.”

The article propelled We Are Too Many, Kentucky author Hannah Pittard’s experimental memoir, into a renewed spotlight. Told in essays and fragments, the book chronicles the dissolution of the relationships at the heart of Heath’s feature and is an unsparing excavation of friendship, loyalty and what we hide from ourselves. Wild, weird and riveting because it’s real life, the book is a clever reminder of the possibilities, however painful, in starting over again.

For your aunt who kept the family photo albums all these years

All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey
Teresa Wong
(Arsenal Pulp Press)

Calgary graphic novelist Teresa Wong knocks it out of the park with a memoir that will strike a chord with anyone familiar with the long silences that can punctuate life in immigrant families. Wong brings us to her childhood in suburban Calgary, where she and her brother would spend weekends wandering Deerfoot mall while their mother worked at a fast-food joint in the food court.

Wong’s experiences of her parents contrast sharply with their dramatic experiences as young adults. They were among the thousands of young people who came of age during China’s Cultural Revolution and hatched secret plans to escape. They separately left China by swimming to freedom in Hong Kong. Wong dives into her family history that is rarely discussed these days, but key to who she is — and it helps us all understand the ways in which generations strive, however imperfectly, for a better life.

For the snowbird eyeing warming climes

Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel
Steve Burgess
(Douglas & McIntyre)

Tyee contributing editor Steve Burgess drew lots of attention for his book Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel when it came out in the spring. In lieu of giving actual, all-expenses-paid adventures to your loved ones, this is a perfect stocking stuffer for its mix of funny yarns and reporting on the good, bad and ugly of tourism. Plus a dash of philosophizing. Burgess strives to be a “mindful tourist” but doesn’t exclude himself from the mess made by globe-hoppers. Every step of the way holds a basic tension. Can the positives of travel done better outweigh the damage tourism does to cultures and nature?

For your nephew thinking about applying to journalism school

Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism
Christopher Cheung
(Purich Books/UBC Press)

Tyee staff reporter and Vancouver resident Christopher Cheung’s first book is a must-read for journalists at every stage in the game, and it’s been a prominent feature in the course materials of local journalism schools this fall. Under the White Gaze uses scholarly research and Cheung’s personal experiences in the industry to help readers make sense of representational strategies and pitfalls in Canadian journalism. “I want to challenge news audiences to think about how any journalism they consume is crafted, how information is framed and ultimately how knowledge is produced,” Cheung told The Tyee this fall. “News can strive for accuracy, but the subjectivity of the journalist can still creep in.”

For everyone who wants to centre pleasure, goofiness and curiosity in their sex lives

Hot, Wet and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk about Sex
Kaleigh Trace
(Invisible Publishing)

Ride along with disabled queer author and therapist Kaleigh Trace in the riotous, 10-year anniversary edition of beautiful and heartbreaking essays about all the ways we learn to have sex — and including new essays exploring Trace’s terminal cancer diagnosis. What could sex and death possibly have in common? They both demand your full attention and will break your heart, and to be good at either, you need to be vulnerable, Trace says.

Reading this book is like curling up with your best friend and swapping hilarious sex stories, where one moment you’re laughing so hard you manage to snort wine out your nose and the next you’re crying because you’ve been there too. Just maybe avoid gifting this to anyone who would take issue with an entire chapter dedicated to the word “fuck.”

For your punk rock friend spending the winter in a hail of Mason jars, canning

Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence
andrea bennett
(ECW Press)

From their home kitchen on the northern Sunshine Coast, Tyee senior editor andrea bennett is regularly turning out the kind of everyday fare that any local café would aspire towards in a great week. Hearty, their seventh book, is an essay collection that explores the connections between food systems and sustainable communities, family and sustenance, pleasure and the body.

“There’s a real interplay between the structural and the personal in food. A lot of stuff that is rightly in the sphere of the structural is transmuted to the realm of the personal,” bennett told The Tyee this fall. Their book blends memoir with incisive analysis of why we need to reconsider how we think about food and health. “If we want a ‘healthier’ populace — and I’m putting that phrase in quotes because societally we need to rethink what healthy means — then we have to create the conditions for people to thrive.”

For the thoughtful citizen who wonders what ‘axe the tax’ omits

The Carbon Tax Question: Clarifying Canada’s Most Consequential Policy Debate
Thomas F. Pedersen
(Harbour)

Arriving at a time when political parties on both the left and the right are promising to remove the consumer carbon tax, this book is largely a celebration of British Columbia’s pioneering work to put a price on carbon emissions and the political bravery it took to have it survive for 16 years. It traces the policy back to the pine beetle infestation that grew thanks to warmer winters and killed large swaths of trees through the province’s Interior, then looks at how a conservative BC Liberal government introduced the tax shift, defended it and won elections because of it.

B.C.’s story is “good news” that’s contrasted with the experience in Australia, where simplistic politics killed attempts to introduce a similar carbon tax. Canada’s daily news provides another contrast. The campaign against the carbon tax is made in three words. The case to “max the tax” requires more explaining. It’s worth taking the time.

For your Winnipeg friend who thinks it’s a great place to be from, but not to live in

Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre
Niigaan Sinclair
(McClelland & Stewart)

This Governor General’s Literary Award-winning book will show them it’s really two cities in one. Wînipêk is the Indigenous city that predates but still enfolds Winnipeg, with a history that offers many surprises. For example, in the 13th century, 10,000 people from nine cultures met to end wars across a region extending from Ontario to the Dakotas — an area larger than western Europe. Niigaan Sinclair is a great guide to a city your friend will be homesick for.

For the police history buff

Canada’s State Police: 150 Years of the RCMP
Greg Marquis
(James Lorimer & Co.)

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is one of Canada's most iconic and enduring institutions. But it can also be considered a major instrument of a colonial state, has an unsavoury history of suppressing social movements and continues to make modern-day screw-ups. University of New Brunswick historian Greg Marquis has been teaching and writing about police history for decades and takes full stock of the national force in Canada’s State Police: 150 Years of the RCMP.

He charts the RCMP’s journey to today, looks at obstacles to change and modernization, and highlights important questions about what the future could hold for the body. In the end, Marquis told The Tyee in an interview, the RCMP is a public service and so should be accountable to citizens. “Who do the police belong to?” he asks. “Do they belong to the police or do they belong to me and other people like me?”

For anyone who finds the art world bewildering, incomprehensible or deeply hilarious

The Wendy Award
Walter Scott
(Drawn & Quarterly)

Dedicated to disembowelling the narcissism, pomposity and insular excess that is the sign and signifier of the contemporary art world, each title in Walter Scott’s Wendy series takes a running kick at arty-fartiness. The quasi-autobiographical avatar of Kahnawá:ke-born, Toronto-based artist Scott, Wendy has staggered through different incarnations, from art student to sessional faculty to bona fide art star. Montreal’s mighty Drawn & Quarterly published Scott’s first graphic novel on Wendy’s art-world tribulations, Wendy’s Revenge, in 2014, and Wendy, Master of Art followed anon.

The Wendy Award, the latest book in the ongoing saga that is the life and career of the one-woman train wreck, ups the ante. Our heroine has finally secured a measure of fame and some money, thanks in part to her winning a major corporate award. You might think things would be looking up for our girl, but you would be terribly wrong. Gleeful excoriation? Yes! Pathos? That too! Epic hilarity? Of course. Hold on to your art hats, everyone, Wendy is going viral.

For lovers of graphic novel memoirs and sweeping histories

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir
Tessa Hulls
(McClelland & Stewart)

There’s nothing like a great big sumptuously illustrated graphic memoir. There are three women representing three generations at the heart of Feeding Ghosts: Tessa Hulls, her mother Rose and her grandmother Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist caught in the middle of the rise of Communist China.

Sun Yi flees to Hong Kong with her young daughter, writes a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, and descends into mental illness immediately after. Rose becomes her mother’s caretaker and a smothering mother in turn as the trio make a new life in the United States. It prompts Hulls, a self-described cowboy, to escape as far as Antarctica to live her own life, working as a cook on a research station. But, haunted by a history she never really understood, she retraces her family’s steps through political upheaval and paranoia, and finally gets to know her grandmother, the “90-pound spectre who shuffled around our house in grey Costco sweatpants.”

This is a deeply personal story against an epic backdrop, exploring grief, exile, love and family myths, drawing us in with page after page awash in shadows with many lurking spectres. Hulls spent 10 years writing and illustrating the work, and the labour shows. It is an instant classic of graphic memoir alongside modern works like Fun Home, Blankets, Persepolis, The Best We Could Do and Ducks.

For BC history buffs

Raincoast Chronicles Fifth Five
David R. Conn, Howard White, Jean Barman, Judith Williams, Rick James
(Harbour)

Hippies arrive in Sointula. Tetrahedron Park is established on the Sunshine Coast. A record-breaking salmon is caught at Painter’s Lodge in Campbell River. Raincoast Chronicles Fifth Five collects a whopping 712 pages of British Columbia history, focusing in on the way personal stories inevitably intertwine with what, looking back, become monumental or remarkable moments. There are poems, recipes, photos, maps — an avalanche of material to dip into and return to, and a perfect coffee table book for a city home or far-flung cabin alike.

For the mall rats

Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning
Kate Black
Coach House Books

If your Victor Gruen biography had been looking lonely on the shelf, mall lovers have been eating well as of late with Alexandra Lange’s 2022 Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall and now Kate Black’s delightful and thoughtful Big Mall. Black takes us through her coming of age in the obscenely capitalist West Edmonton Mall, how these unreal spaces come to be and how, despite their artificial trappings, we find meaning in them. Anyone dismissive of serious discourse on the mall needs to read this book. We want to share an Auntie Anne’s pretzel with Kate Black now.

For anyone musing on what it means to speak

May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers
Minelle Mahtani
Doubleday Canada

How do you find your voice? How does it feel when you lose it? As Minelle Mahtani started her job as a host on Vancouver’s Roundhouse Radio station, her mother told her she had tongue cancer. The poetic memoir takes us through Mahtani’s personal and professional lives: her upbringing as the daughter of an Iranian Muslim mother and an Indian Hindu father; her confrontations with race in the schoolyard and in the newsroom; her battles to bring an unapologetically anti-colonial lens to a radio show for the masses; and her journey alongside family in the last days of her mother’s life.

This book will be of special interest to Vancouverites who miss hearing the now-defunct Roundhouse Radio, offering a behind-the-scenes look into the building of the one-of-a-kind show hosted by Mahtani. A tender and intimate memoir of stories and connection, parents and children, mourning and healing, goodbyes and legacies.

For your loved one whose winter holiday season will be marbled with grief

Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love
Sarah Leavitt
(Arsenal Pulp Press)

Vancouver graphic novelist Sarah Leavitt’s latest book will be a balm for anyone moving through loss, and it will be particularly resonant to people whose grief may be entangled with stigmatized or unconventional death. Something, Not Nothing follows Leavitt in the months and years leading up to and following her partner Donimo Hanson’s death in 2020.

Hanson died by medically assisted death at 54, after struggling for years with overlapping chronic health conditions that became too painful to endure. Leavitt’s memoir is as much a tribute to Hanson and their 22-year partnership as it is an exploration of what comes after death, and what it means to step into a new chapter after life-changing loss. The book is humbling; Leavitt’s writing invites forgiveness and lasting, radiant empathy.

For your queer cousin with an enduring poetic sensibility

Terrarium
Matthew Walsh
(Goose Lane)

So many of us are born yearning to make art — but into a world that requires us to go to work at the paragraph factory or any service industry gig that will have us. And yet we make art anyway, at least for as long as we’re able. At the bathhouse. About industrious rats. About taking the subway. About the people who come into our jobs, with their demands and desires and preferences. Matthew Walsh’s second poetry book is beautiful in the way things can seem the most beautiful when we’re the most tired — too tired to be anything but the most honest.

For the political junkie in your life who just can’t leave the big picture alone

How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon
David Shields
(Sublation Media)

Whenever a new unbelievable thing happens in the United States, David Shields probably has some thoughts about it. A prolific writer, thinker and filmmaker, Shields strains the hard and fast definitions of non-fiction with his work. Polemicist, provocateur, troublemaker — take your pick of descriptors — his work easily evades categorization and carves out new territory out there on the fringes.

It is a thrilling experience, akin to walking the high wire, to see what Shields can do with words and ideas. How We Got Here is particularly relevant, almost painfully so, but there’s also something strangely hopeful in bringing together thinkers, writers, artists and intellects from over the centuries in the great tradition of trying to figure shit out.

For critics of corporate-motivated ‘grassroots’ movements

Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil Through Social Media
Jordan B. Kinder
(University of Minnesota Press)

How did the oil and gas economy in Canada become not only so successful, but so intertwined with Canadian identity? A riff on “astroturfing,” Petroturfing attributes the industry’s success to Ezra Levant and his 2010 book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, which worked to rebrand Canada’s oil and gas industry as the ethical choice over Middle Eastern oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

Levant and the broader petroturfing project saturated the media environment with pro-oil narratives, author Jordan B. Kinder told The Tyee. “We now have a surplus of fringe, online phenomena having arguably outsized influence on society,” he added. As we face movements like the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” Kinder’s research offers a necessary dissection of how these “grassroots” movements gain social traction.

For fans of The Tyee (hey, that’s you!)

Points of Interest: In Search of the Places, People, and Stories of BC
Edited by David Beers and andrea bennett
(Greystone Books)

We’re so proud of how well our essay anthology, published in the spring, did this year — it spent 23 weeks on the B.C. bestseller list. And we’ve got a good guess that if you’re reading this, you helped us achieve that.

Edited by The Tyee’s David Beers and andrea bennett, Points of Interest includes pieces by many of our regular contributors, including Steve Burgess, Christopher Cheung, Amanda Follett Hosgood, Andrew Nikiforuk and Dorothy Woodend. Take the 100-Mile Diet north with J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith; discover the truth about blueberry picking in Abbotsford with Harrison Mooney; learn how seagulls on Granville Island are controlled using raptors with Michelle Cyca; and unearth the fate of Cumberland’s early Chinese community with Michael John Lo. Perfect for gifts and stocking stuffers, this book of essays will take you on an eclectic literary road trip through B.C. culture.

And don’t forget — share your favourites in the comments below!

With contributions from David Beers, andrea bennett, Christopher Cheung, Michelle Gamage, Ximena González, Katie Hyslop, Crawford Kilian, Sarah Krichel, Andrew MacLeod, Dorothy Woodend and Jackie Wong.