Browsing “Vancouver Book Club”

	blank Wherein we look at some of the local books that have been published this year and give you some ideas of what to get your book-loving friends and family for Hanukkah, Solstice, Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just because it’s a day ending with “y”.
	Don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores!

Liquor, Lust, and the Law: The Story of Vancouver’s Legendary Penthouse Nightclub
by Aaron Chapman
Arsenal Pulp Press 

The past couple of years have seen the publication of some incredible books about Vancouver history: Vancouver Noir, At the World’s Edge: Curt Lang’s Vancouver, and Fred Herzog Photographs immediately come to mind. Now Aaron Chapman and Arsenal Pulp Press give us a look into a Vancouver landmark and the family that have kept it going for more than 60 years.

Most people today know the Penthouse Nightclub as a “Downtown Vancouver Exotic Haven,” but in the first two decades after brothers Joe, Ross, Mickey, and Jimmy Filippone opened it in 1947, it became the place to see and be seen. It was a popular spot for visiting musicians and actors to relax, get a drink (or four), and listen to music. Any not just any music. Acts like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington performed there, and the Penthouse was one of the few places in Vancouver where African-American musicians could perform.

Chapman covers all of this, plus the more lurid aspects of the club’s history from the 1970s and 80s. He worked closely with current owner Danny Filippone in gathering family history, stories, and photographs. The 160 photographs throughout the book capture the famous and infamous aspects of The Penthouse, and Chapman doesn’t shy away from or gloss over the steamier side of the club’s history.

Liquor, Lust and the Law is a great read and a look into a part of the history of “No Fun City” that is usually kept behind closed doors.

Vancouver Heritage Tours will be hosting tours Tuesday Dec. 11 at the Penthouse. Join Danny Filippone and Aaron Chapman for a night of stories, food, drink, and entertainment as they take you on a “behind-the-scenes” tour of the historic family business. Aaron Chapman will also be selling signed copies of his book, so you might want to check off a few people from your holiday list. Details and ticket information at heritagevancouver.org.

Click to read our previous Holiday Lit List suggestions.

	blank Wherein we look at some of the local books that have been published this year and give you some ideas of what to get your book-loving friends and family for Hanukkah, Solstice, Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just because it’s a day ending with “y”.
	Don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores!

Trobairitz
by Catherine Owen
Anvil Press

Many know of troubadours, traveling poet-musicians from various classes who, during the High Middle Ages, wrote and sang songs of courtly love. They sang of love for unattainable women, of something that was often in view but always out of reach.

Very few people know of the trobairitzes, aristocratic women who composed in the vernacular of Langue d’Oc and whose work was usually sung by employed singers. They were the first known female composers of Western secular music, writing about other troubadours and knights, about betrayal, disappointment, and social inequality.

For many years poet Catherine Owen has been studying the trobairitzes and the song forms they used, such as the canso and the tenso. While this might sound quite academic, this latest collection from Owen is anything but as she melds the lyric forms of the trobairitzes with her love of metal. She describes it as “a book of poems that puts troubadours and metalheads in a mosh pit of forms, tunes and beats and lets them go at it until blood or song results.”

She writes of the trobairitzes of whom we know so little, and as a trobairitz herself writes of love and loss, of memory and longing. She writes of her experiences playing bass with such acts as Inhuman, Helgrind and her current musical project Medea. Her cansos are populated by musicians and fans, groupies and gods of the metal music world. The meld of 21st century metalheads and 12th century lyric forms is intriguing and refreshing.

Plazer 3
Festival at Avignon, May 2006 

Love for the space in which we sang, its stage
the magical demarcation of tape on a common floor.

Love for Kim’s wiry bones, his platforms and all Sasha’s
80s spray-crazed hair.

For the roster of bands, rough local vermin to hewn
angels, love for this great chain of music!

And efficiency, each act blooming its hard flowers in
half hour sets, take down fast, sprung muscles

rafting amps across the span, stacking them like cubes
of air, everywhere cords veining across monitors, taped

against mics, and even when the next band yells –
“Anyone have a spare pedal?” loving the panic

of forgetting the essential and then the rescue
just before the first stunned plif from the smoke

machine as buddy grabs the missing gear from his truck
and all is once again fellowship.

Love for the way we play through pain.
—
Click to read our previous Holiday Lit List suggestions.

	blank Wherein we look at some of the local books that have been published this year and give you some ideas of what to get your book-loving friends and family for Hanukkah, Solstice, Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just because it’s a day ending with “y”.
	Don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores!

The Salmon Recipes: Stories of Our Endangered North Coast Cuisine
Edited by Luanne Roth
Prince Rupert Environmental Society 

We are all connected. What befalls the land and water and animals in one part of the world has an effect on the health and well-being of those who live elsewhere on the planet. Prince Rupert may seem a far distance from Yaletown and Kits, and you might wonder how a book of recipes and stories about the North Coast fits into our “local” view, but the environmental and ecological disaster that is the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway affects all British Columbians.

This book put together by the Prince Rupert Environmental Society is much more than just a collection of recipes. It’s a conversation about tradition and the land and about the food we eat. Each recipe is paired with one or two stories or poems, often ones that relate to the recipe. So Lou Allison’s recipe for Maryland Crab Cakes is paired with this brief anecdote from Cameron Hill of the Aayawk, Ha’gwil Iaxhaand, and Ka’gwaays First Nations:

Sweet Smell of Crabs Cooking

There’s nothing that makes me feel beter that to have my crab cooking outside of my father’s house or my house and to have people walk by and smell it…and…to share what I have. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

	blank Wherein we look at some of the local books that have been published this year and give you some ideas of what to get your book-loving friends and family for Hanukkah, Solstice, Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just because it’s a day ending with “y”.
	Don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores!

The Messenger
by Stephen Miller
Delacorte Press

There’s nothing like a tense and realistic bio-thriller to make you want to avoid air travel, stay locked up in your house and hope you have enough canned goods to see you through the upcoming epidemic. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a couple of Stephen Miller’s books with you to help pass the time and fuel the paranoia.

In his fifth novel, The Messenger, Vancouver-author (and actor) Miller looks at the next incarnation of terror, bio-weapons, and its delivery system via young, idealistic men and woman. Plucked from a Middle Eastern refugee camp at a young age, Daria has been indoctrinated, groomed, and trained to deliver a crippling blow to the unsuspecting Western European and American capitalist population. Blend in. Take on their attitudes and mimic their frivolous lives. Play on the American obsession with superficiality and desire for fame, all the while sentencing them to death. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

	blank Wherein we look at some of the local books that have been published this year and give you some ideas of what to get your book-loving friends and family for Hanukkah, Solstice, Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just because it’s a day ending with “y”.
	Don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores!

People Who Disappear
by Alex Leslie
Freehand Books 

Not to sound like I’m channeling Forrest Gump, but I’ve always thought of short story collections as being like a box of chocolates. There are some stories that you really enjoy and you hope the next one tastes as good. Then there are some that after a page or two you feel like you’ve bitten into that one with the orange goo inside (what is that stuff anyway?).

And then there’s People Who Disappear. Alex Leslie‘s short story debut is like opening the chocolate box with your eyes closed and discovering that every piece you put in your mouth is a truffle.

The twelves stories all deal with relationships: with friends, family, lovers, strangers, society, ourselves. At first it is easy to think that the people being presented here are other people, people whose lives are nothing like our own, but Leslie presents these narratives in such a way that we soon come to recognize in the characters something of ourselves or of people we know. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

	Read All Over celebrates the bookworm in all of us, showcasing readers in Vancouver and the books they love most.
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	Tim Kelleher is a writer, actor and director originally from New York City who now makes Vancouver his home. He also serves as New Media Editor for First Things magazine where he writes on topics related to religion, politics and culture.

The one book you always recommend is…

Well, the #1 book I recommend is actually a library of books — the Bible. In my view, one of the tragedies of contemporary Western culture is the broadening unfamiliarity with this astonishing collection. Folks who dismiss it out of hand deprive themselves of a priceless and endlessly rewarding treasure.

How do you like your books served up best — audio books, graphic novels, used paperbacks, library loaners, e-reader…

I like a physical book – in my hands. I really enjoy the tactility of it. Old hardcovers are are particular delight – though tougher to travel with. But, you can’t beat the way they look on a shelf, or how they populate a room. I tend to write in my books, so that makes audio versions and e-readers a lot less appealing.

What book makes you feel like a kid again?

The first thing that comes to mind isn’t a book, but Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas In Wales.” – Sigh- What can I say?

Who is your favorite Vancouver/Lower Mainland author?

Okay — immediate disclaimer: the author I’m about to mention happens to be my spouse — but hold on! Billie Livingston and I were in the early stage of our coupling. I knew she’d published a book called, Going Down Swinging, and I knew I’d have to read it. But that seemed tricky. What if I thought it was a stinker? Not long before, a friend wrote a book that came out to some fanfare. I eagerly got hold of it and quickly started to wince. The writer was clearly talented and clever, but I found the book wildly overwritten and woefully self-conscious. So…what if I read Billie’s book and thought it was a dud? …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>