This past weekend the Vancouver Historical Society held its annual luncheon to commemorate the incorporation of the city in 1886. This year's lunch was at the Vancouver Club in the ballroom of its gorgeous 1914 "clubhouse" downtown on Hastings Street ..read more

Construction began last week on a new Vancouver Art Gallery, much discussed but now apparently coming to fruition ..read more

Two things to draw your attention to ..read more

Joe's Cafe is a landmark on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, not least because of an infamous political protest that broke out there in 1990. When the owner ejected two lesbian patrons for openly kissing on the premises, he touched off a boycott of the cafe by supporters of gay rights. The protest lasted several months until the owner apologized ..read more

One Christmas present I very much appreciated was Jonathan Raban's last book, Father and Son ..read more

In the November issue of the Literary Review of Canada, under the guise of revisiting Jack Granatstein's 1998 polemic, Who Killed Canadian History, Patrice Dutil writes a lament about the state of Canadian history today ..read more

Another year has rolled around and once again The British Columbia Review is in the middle of its fundraising drive. You know the Review, BC's best on-line book review site (and I don't say that just because I am a member of the editorial board). If you care about books and the conversation about books then why not consider helping out? The Review's estimable man-in-charge, Richard Mackie, tells you how ..read more

Congratulations to Adam Bunch, winner of this year's Pierre Berton Award, known officially as the Governor General's History Award for Popular Media. I am not familiar with Adam's work -- perhaps because I live a long way from Toronto -- but as you can see from the video he is prolific in a variety of media ..read more

Yesterday brought news of the passing of Clyde Rose, co-founder of Newfoundland's Breakwater Books, at the age of 86. I have written here previously about my own connection to Breakwater, which published an early book of mine way back in 1984. Condolences to the Rose family ..read more

The BC and Yukon Book Prizes were awarded over the weekend. The winners are: Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize - Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Canada) Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize - Karen Bakker, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press) Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize - Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, A is for Acholi (Wolsak & Wynn ..read more