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Vancouver Sun
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Vancouver Sun
Add these 10 B.C. book titles to your summer reading list
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. As you start thinking about summer holiday plans, take a moment and curate a list of books that will make either great travel companions or welcome additions to a relaxing staycation. To help you pull together the ultimate summer reading list , here are 10 B.C. books to dive into during the summer holidays: Get top headlines and gossip from the world of celebrity and entertainment. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sun Spots will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The Tiger and the Cosmonaut By Eddy Boudel Tan (Penguin Canada — Viking) This nourishing page-turner about small town secrets is the perfect way to unwind after a day in the sun. Casper is living in Vancouver with his boyfriend. He hardly ever returns home to the small B.C. town where he was raised, and where his twin brother Sam went missing 20 years earlier. That changes when Casper must return home after his father vanishes too. Who Shot Estevan Light: And Other Tales From the Salish Sea and Beyond By Douglas Hamilton (Caitlin Press) A collection of stories of maritime history and local folklore, this book would make a great addition to a coastal B.C. cabin coffee table. A pirate that may have been part of Butch Cassidy's gang and rumrunners with aircraft engines powering their boats are just a couple of tales that come alive on its pages. Killer on the First Page By Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson (Harper Collins) The brothers Ferguson, both multiple Leacock Medal for Humour winners, deliver a murder mystery set at a writer's festival and a murder mystery festival. Six famous crime fiction writers and their famously large egos are in attendance, and they're a handful. New bookstore co-owner and former TV star Miranda Abbott must deal with these lions of crime literature and murder. The Deepest Fake By Dan Kalla (Simon & Schuster) Vancouver's thriller novel machine Dan Kalla is back with another timely story. This time Kalla, who's day job is an emergency room doctor, heads into the world of AI for a story about a man whose life is coming apart at the seams. Successful AI company CEO Liam Hirsch has it all until he's diagnosed with a terminal illness soon after finding out his wife is cheating on him. But here's the hook: In a world of deepfake everything, has the technology he works closely with been weaponized against him? What is real and what isn't? Now that is the question. Charity Trickett is Not So Glamorous By Christine Stringer (Spark Press) Written by a former Hollywood assistant and screenwriter, this romp of a novel is set in 1997 and follows a young assistant with big dreams, who moves from Vancouver to Los Angeles to work for an A-list director. Once there, Charity Trickett's dream of climbing the ladder to screenwriting and producing success is stymied at every turn by a backstabbing co-worker and a big, potentially billion-dollar mistake. A Season in the Okanagan By Bill Arnott (Rocky Mountain Books) If you're a and you're looking to stay in the province for your summer vacation, chances are, you're thinking about the Okanagan Valley. If you do decide to head for the sun, pick up a copy of this informative, entertaining and very packable book from seasoned travel writer Arnott. Bones of a Giant By Brian Thomas Isaac (Random House Canada) The Kelowna author of the Governor General's Literary Award finalist All the Quiet Places is back with the novel Bones of a Giant. Set in 1968 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, where Isaac was born, the novel dives into a teenager's struggle with grief and becoming a man in a world that does him no favours. Dead Men Wag No Tails By Sarah Fox (Severn House) This cosy mystery is set in the fictional northern Oregon Coast town of Twilight Cove as it readies to celebrate an 18th-century pirate and all-around bad guy Dead Eye Dawson. Just before the day of celebration, pirate enthusiast and celebration committee member Jasper Hogan is found in a pool of blood in his study by fellow committee member Georgie Johansen. Georgie, who works at an animal sanctuary, goes into sleuth mode and sets out to find the killer. This is a perfect beach bag addition that comes with all cosy mystery signposts: murder, intrigue, love and two dogs with supernatural powers. OK, maybe that last thing is unique. The Final Spire: Mystery Mountain Maina in the 1930s By Trevor Marc Hughes (Ronsdale Press) Who doesn't like a good adventure story, especially a true one? Hughes — whose previous book Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition would also make a great addition to your summer reading list — is back. This time Hughes looks at pioneering climbers who tried, in the early 1930s, to conquer Mystery Mountain, a.k.a. Mount Waddington. The Final Spire is a chronicle of fascinating history and good old-fashioned chutzpah. Calm Harbour, Turbulent Seas: A History of Ucluelet By Shirley Martin (Harbour Publishing) If the west coast of Vancouver Island is on your summer travel list, this book would be a perfect companion. Martin, whose family has spent four generations in the area, has done decades of research and interviews for this comprehensive history of Ucluelet, complete with stories about settlement and dispossession, tragedies and triumphs, First Nations history and contemporary culture. And yes, shipwrecks and sea serpents too. Dgee@
CBC
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Scaachi Koul let herself go 'fully insane' after her divorce. Her book explains why
Social Sharing In Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul candidly recounts the painful events that turned her life upside down, from her marriage falling apart to her mother's cancer diagnosis. With her signature humour, Koul reflects on navigating struggle — shifting from her belief that fighting is the only way out — to exploring when to fight and when to let go in the face of life's unexpected challenges. " Sucker Punch is the truth, but more important than that, it is honest," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "All I can do is offer my honest appraisal of what I think happened and how I feel about it. "There will always be a million other versions of what happened and they will also be honest and true." Koul is a writer from Calgary who currently lives in Brooklyn. Her debut book, One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, was a finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She is currently a senior writer at Slate and co-hosts the Ambie Award-winning podcast Scamfluencers. She joined Mattea Roach to talk about divorce in the public eye —and why she felt compelled to write about her experiences. Mattea Roach: What was it like to leave and have the fact of your leaving be so public? Scaachi Koul: So I think almost everybody has to kind of play this game when they have a life event like this happen because almost everybody is on the Internet. So when you get divorced, if you're just a regular person, you're still playing that game of, "How do I perform this out loud?" How do I tell people? What do I tell people? Do I post about it? What do I do about the photos that I've left online? That is all shared experience. I made the super cool decision in my 20s to become an essayist, so I had the added complication of how do I write about this? Because I have to. My first book came out around eight years ago called One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter. A lot of it was about my family, my ex-partner, about the process of getting him sort of accepted into my family. That book ends with me not really knowing if my family is going to get their head around him. I realized that anything I write, I have to acknowledge this because I made a choice to tell people. How do I offer a narrative without it feeling incomplete? Which feels unfair, because I brought you into everything else and I also didn't know how to write anything without acknowledging it or without really getting into the weeds on it. Because then it becomes a weird omission, right? Do you just stop mentioning that you have a husband and then hope that people will notice? Which they would have, they absolutely would have over time, and people did, but it just felt like not my style. Also I was roiling with feeling — I was like a Calgary weather pattern. There were five strong feelings in about 28 minutes. You need a coat, everyone's unhappy, nobody wants to be outside. When I lived in Calgary for a couple years as a child, I remember it hailing on Canada Day. It always hails in the summer. You can have a day when it's -20 and then 20 degrees. That's how it felt hanging out with me, so everybody would have known. I had no subtlety, but I was also angry about the idea of having to perform being normal anyway. I didn't want to anymore. Talk more about that because I think that's something that a lot of people who've gone through a big life event probably can relate to. The question of how long do I get to be really publicly upset about this? And at what point are people going to be like, "Okay, we get it, you're divorced. Please talk to me about something else." I gave myself a year to be fully insane. Like money wasn't real. My decisions had no consequences. I could have anything I wanted. I could say how I felt as long as I didn't get sued, which I still abide by. I could be selfish in a way that as long as it didn't harm other people. And I was. I was wanton and surly and delightful and exhausting. I drank a lot and I got 600 tattoos. I bought everything I wanted and I moved into a new apartment and I bought a custom pink velvet couch. I gave myself a year to be fully insane. - Scaachi Koul I lost my mind, but it was what I needed. I think the thing that I took from that year is I still carry disinterest in performing for other people whatever I'm supposed to perform. How is it that you feel comfortable that people might not enjoy the way that you handle this thing that's happening in your life? How did I get comfortable being upset? I felt like through my marriage, through my whole 20s, I was so preoccupied with what people think of me. Do they like me? Do I seem reasonable? Am I doing a good job? I panicked all the time about what my standing was with lots of people, no one more so than with my ex-husband. Does he like me? Does he love me? Is he loyal? Does he want to take care of me? Does he want to stay in this relationship? Do I want to stay in this relationship? And so once that fell apart and exploded in such a catastrophic way and I really had to sort of reset my life in a lot of ways. It was like, "Oh, it doesn't matter." The person I loved most in this world, who I thought I was building a life with and I felt very protective of and hoped was protective of me, does not care about me in the way that I need and have been asking for for a long time. And I'm preoccupied with what?
