Christmas gift: Top 10 fiction and non-fiction books
Experts give their top picks for books to consider wrapping up and putting under the tree
Looking for a great book to gift to someone this holiday season?
Two experts, Deb McVittie and Barbara Jo May, joined host Sheryl MacKay on North by Northwest to give their top fiction and non-fiction picks
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Deb McVittie owns 32 Books in North Vancouver and Hornby Island, and Barbara Jo May is adult collections librarian at the Okanagan Regional Library in Kelowna.
Fiction
1. His Whole Life by Elizabeth Hay
The book's setting is during the second Quebec referendum and is focused around a question that the protagonist, a young boy named Jim, asks his parents: "What's the worst thing you've ever done?"
"And his father had no trouble answering and it wasn't horrific, but his mother really said she had to think about it and this is an idea that comes up back and forth throughout the story," said McVittie.
"You really want to read the book to find out what Jim and his mother do decide are the worst things they've ever done."
2. Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
May: "It starts off with this headline-grabbing scene where a woman, who is in her mid-fifties, and who lives in a small Connecticut house says she's happy because the next day her daughter's getting married and in her house she has her daughter, and her soon-to-be son-in-law, her ex husband and her lover, and before she returns to her house there's an explosion and the house and everyone in it is lost. It's a story about how one bears the unbearable.
"It's a really moving book and its great story telling. It is a first novel but Clegg … had two unsparing memoirs, one called the Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man, and then another called 90 Days, and I somehow think he knows what it's like to have your life explode and have to rebuild it."
3. The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright
This story takes place in the 1500s in Peru and Spain, and is told through the eyes of Waman, a young Incan boy who is captured by the Spanish and used as a translator.
"He's fairly horrified in some ways by the Spanish culture and what he sees there, and the Spanish, of course, call the Inca barbarians, and he's shocked, because he said at home we had everything, everything clicked along, and the Inca, when pressed by the Spanish to say what their country was called, said, 'Well we just call it the world,'" said McVittie.
"It just reads like a rollicking wonderful adventure story, and after you've read it you realize you've absorbed all this history along the way. A wonderful story, and the men on your list will love it as well."
4. This is the Life by Alex Shearer
In this story about two English brothers, the older brother — who had always been the smarter one who did everything right — calls his younger brother to ask for help because he has been diagnosed with a brain tumour.
"So the young brother heads to Australia to help him, when he gets there he sees that his brilliant brother now is eccentric, doesn't have good hygiene, lives in a derelict house, has a derelict boat, has never really found his place, has broken relationships with women, and is restless but is still his brother and needs his help," said May.
"The story is told with the two brothers swapping anecdotes about their early life ... it's a really compassionate book."
5. Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
This is the fictional memoir of Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, who finds herself abandoned in Kenya.
McVittie: "This is a wonderful story. The landscape of Kenya is definitely one of the characters in this story, it's a fabulous story about a women doing what she needs to do at a time where society was absolutely not supporting her to do that, such as writing and becoming a horse trainer."
Non-fiction
1. The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard
"It's a holocaust story seen through the eyes of a child in the Warsaw ghetto and the fear, the filth, the hunger, the danger," said May, of those book that tells the story between the boy and Dr. Janusz Korczak, whose ideas later came to form the basis for the United Nations declaration for the rights of children.
"It's an amazing book and I think at some point people will call it a masterpiece."
2. Pacific by Simon Winchester
"The subtitle of this book says a lot of it: silicon ships and surfboards, coral reefs and atom bombs, brutal distorts, fading empires and the coming collision of the world's superpowers," said McVittie.
"It's worth a read I think by anybody on your list."
3. White Eskimo: Knud Rasmussen's Fearless Journey in the Heart of the Arctic by Stephen Bown
May: "It's actually the first major biography of Rasmussen in English and Bown does this fabulous job of this amazing man who was raised by a Danish dad and a Greenalandic Inuit mom, and who became, for my money, one of the most amazing explorers and also ethnographer of Inuit life."
4. The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson
His book is certainly worth a long and enjoyable stroll," said McVittie of Bryson's book, which is all about the British.
"There's travel, and history, and humour, and there's also a great enthusiasm for keeping Britain beautiful ... and at the very end of the book he lists some random things that he finds pleasing in the Britannic way such as country pubs , jam roly poly with custard, the shipping forecast, creamy teas, saying 'You're the dog's bollocks' as an expression of endearment, and villages with ridiculous names.
5. Writing the Okanagan by George Bowering
"Bowering has obviously rummaged not only through his own photos, but also through various museums and historical society archives ... I think it's the kind of book that you don't have to read cover to cover, you can kind of pick and choose what sort of grabs your attention," said May.
To hear the full interview listen to the audio labelled: Two book experts give their top fiction and non-fiction book selections for the holidays