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Personally, I have never understood the "beach book." Every summer the media are full of stories about the perfect book to take to the seashore -- usually the Proust you've never had time for or this week's James Patterson. But I don't go to the beach, at least not often. In the summer I do my reading in the same places as in the winter -- in the bath, at my desk, at the kitchen table while dinner cooks, basically just about everywhere.

That said, there was one memorable summer that...

A marvelous footnote to my book Closing Time about the history of prohibition, published last year.

In 1922 the Parisian bookseller Sylvia Beach had just published James Joyce's scandalous novel Ulysses and was trying to get copies to customers in the United States, where it was banned. Ernest Hemingway, who had recently moved to Paris and befriended Beach, put her into contact with an adman in
...

Back from a holiday up the coast, I find that the neighbourhood has filled with signs.

BLACK BEAR SIGHTING.

Of course there are election signs as well but these warn of a different species of interloper, come down from the mountains to paw through our garbage. Hardly a day goes by that a bear doesn't blunder into someone's kitchen or take a dip in their wading pool. I have not seen one yet this season but at night the air is redolent of skunk which I've been told means that...

I recently saw the movie Woman in Gold about the legal battle to regain possession of a Gustav Klimt painting taken during the war. It stars Helen Mirren and Vancouver's own Ryan Reynolds, who was not as awful as many critics claimed. 

The movie is very pedestrian but it gives me an excuse to show off one of my prized possessions, a Gustav Klimt finger puppet...

For several years the online Encyclopedia of British Columbia, of which I am the editor, has been available free in schools around the province. This is thanks to an agreement between Harbour Publishing and a consortium of school districts that evaluates online educational resources and makes them available to members.The Harbour website brings the good news that the agreement has...