| Oh, what to do about these conflicting seasonal impulses – to enjoy being warm and generous toward friends and loved ones on one hand, while resisting the slimy tentacles of consumerism on the other? The answer, as usual in this column, is books.
Books are not consumer products in the usual sense. For one thing, hardly anyone makes much money from books, excepting celebrity bios (isn’t that what magazines are for?), cookbooks and books with "chicken soup" in the title. By contrast, small press books and books by what they call "emerging" authors (picture them pecking their way out of their little shells) are particularly exempt from the taint of commerce. So, indulging in small press book-buying and emerging-author book-gifting sprees is one way – the only way outside of home baking – to resolve the above-mentioned seasonal tension, should you suffer from it.
You may already have a mental list of such titles. If so, your work here is done. Off you go to your local independent bookseller. Take your own bags, or why not a suitcase with wheels on it? Keep reading, however, if you’ve been held hostage in your local GigaPlex for the past year and don’t have a list of eligible titles already.
Last week’s column mentioned some so-called "non-fiction" books. Does that mean the following books by local writers are about "things that are not real?" Hardly. Poetry collections like Shane Rhodes’s Holding Pattern and Rajinderpal S. Pal’s Pulse fit that famous description of poetry as "news that stays news." Paolo da Costa’s first short story collection, The Scent of a Lie, will transport your gift-recipient to a pair of small towns in Portugal: avoid being left behind, all alone in Calgary, by reading it aloud to one another. Planning to brighten up January with the High Performance Rodeo? Read Sheri-D Wilson’s new poetry collection, Between Lovers, before you see her play there.
What about Edmonton authors? Have a look at Gloria Sawai’s A Song for Nettie Johnson and poet Marilyn Dumont’s green girl dreams mountains. (Can’t find Dumont’s books? Try Westland Books in Canmore, next to the log-cabin coffee shop place.)
If you still have any faith in that weird fiction/non-fiction divide, you can try two books with narrative drive and well-honed prose that makes them just as much fun to read as novels, even though they’re about "real events." Calgary authors Ken McGoogan and Aritha van Herk tell good stories in Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin, and Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, respectively. (No, they’re neither "small press" nor "emerging." You wouldn’t want to get too puritanical about that, though, would you?)
Finally, a last-minute addition for last-minute book shoppers: editor Lee Shedden will sign copies of A Century of Grant MacEwan at Coles in Toronto Dominion Square on Saturday, December 21 at noon. |
