Books for every reader on your list

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      A couple of weeks ago we listed some of our critics’ favourite books of 2014. Maybe that helped with your gift search, maybe it didn’t, especially if your idea of holiday cheer doesn’t involve religious terrorism or race riots. So here are a few more celebratory choices.

      For the pop-cultured

      Anyone and everyone who’s interested in Vancouver’s musical heritage could use a copy of Aaron Chapman’s Live at the Commodore (Arsenal Pulp), a blazing new illustrated history of the fabled room that’s hosted most of the figures who have made a big musical dent in this town. Rudy Vallee, Willie Dixon, Captain Beefheart (presented by the now-defunct Vancouver Society for Environmental Education, apparently), Tina Turner, Patti Smith, D.O.A., the Modernettes, Screaming Trees (with support act Nirvana in tow), Katy Perry, the Black Keys—they’re all here in the form of stories, photos, posters, and ticket stubs. Indispensable.

      Meanwhile, in a parallel reality—or rather, in a whole cluster of parallel realities—there lives a glossy brick of a book called Sci-Fi Chronicles: A Visual History of the Galaxy’s Greatest Science Fiction (Firefly). General editor Guy Haley is out to map every last sub-, micro-, and nano-genre. Short essays alongside colourful timelines, stills, and promo images profile over 200 works—not just movies and novels but also TV shows, video games, manga, and more, from Buck Rogers and The Jetsons to Le Guin and Tarkovsky. There’s even a chart in the back showing silhouettes of famous spaceships (Tie Fighter, Cylon Raider, Klingon D7 Battle Cruiser, et cetera) in case you spot one and are wondering what it is.

      For visual thinkers

      Perhaps there’s someone on your list who’s tired of ordinary text and its whole boring left-to-right, top-to-bottom thing. You were thinking about buying this person a picture book but then remembered they have one already (it’s about Nepal and still in its shrink-wrap). Jeez, you say, surely there must be other ways of turning the world into exciting book-form information—and there are. Knowledge Is Beautiful (Harper Design), by English designer and “data-journalist” David McCandless, takes the infographic and raises it to an art. His sleek, seemingly organic tables, charts, and diagrams compress and sculpt facts on everything from international etiquette to the history of life on Earth and the composition of the Milky Way. An hour spent here will repattern your thinking.

      Another excellent perspective-shifter is Richard McGuire’s am­azing graphic work Here (Pantheon). This hardcover is a full-colour expansion of his influential 1989 comic of the same name. The concept is as striking as it is simple. The book starts with the drawn image of an empty American front room—window on one wall, fireplace on the other—and holds that vantage as, page by page, it superimposes visual fragments of the past that occurred at this precise point in space: a cat from 1994, a Christmas tree from 1960, a child at play from 1933, an indigenous couple in a forest from 1609, not to mention a desolate swamp from 1203, a barren plain from 500,000 BCE, a neon-coloured gas cloud from 3,000,500,000 BCE. Even as the ground beneath your feet falls away, McGuire creates poetry out of the echoes that’s both playful and moving.

      If for some insane reason neither of these is going to work, you can always head straight for the collection The Best American Comics 2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Assembled by author and guest editor Scott McCloud, this sampler of new work by the likes of Nina Bunjevac, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, and Isabelle Arsenault—to name just four of more than 40 artists represented here—is sure to win through sheer variety and audacity.

      For the puck-possesed

      If you’re buying for the nostalgic hockey geek (easily spotted by a woollen NHL jersey and brown leather skates), it would be hard to go wrong with Hockey Card Stories (ECW). Collector and sportscaster Ken Reid has dug up 59 awesome cards, many of them from the mustache-centric ’70s, and has reproduced both sides of each one here, next to related interviews and anecdotes. There’s a handful of Hall of Famers like Bobby Orr and Steve Shutt, but the heart of the book is in its fame-challenged players, such as Hartford’s Chuck Luksa, whose NHL career lasted eight games in 1979-80 (zero goals, one assist, four penalty minutes), or Mike Antonovich of the WHA Minnesota Fighting Saints’ 1974-75 roster, sporting what looks like Prince Valiant’s haircut on beer and weed. You can almost smell the chemically enriched chewing gum.

      For littler readers

      Shaoli Wang’s vibrant images accompany a collection of folklore and original stories by acclaimed one-time Vancouverite Paul Yee in Chinese Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook (Tradewind). Aimed at an audience between five and 12 years old, each of these yarns—peopled with monks, kings, sorcerers, farmers, and travelling merchants—is paired with a recipe from Judy Chan for such dishes as green-onion pancakes, beef lettuce wraps, and steamed fish with black-bean sauce. Not to be read at bedtime, or you’ll just have to get back up and start rummaging through the fridge.

      And then there’s Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s Sam and Dave Dig a Hole (Candlewick), a brilliantly effortless tale for kids from four to eight that follows its own childlike logic. I can remember being that age and setting out to dig through a neighbourhood sandbox and down to the centre of the Earth, a project I suspended after 40 minutes. According to Sam and Dave, I had no idea what I was missing—and neither do the two boys and their dog as they tunnel into the back yard in search of “something spectacular” and repeatedly fail to find what’s hidden there. The visual trick at the end is subtle and weirdly haunting.

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