The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (Canongate Books), makes excellent bedtime reading for those who have difficulty limiting themselves to just a few pages a night. For each day of the year there are two or three pages of diary entries, in chronological order.

You could take the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (Pedlar Press) into the woods, but this guidebook, written by Rangers Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, is just as suitable for reading in bed. In fact, under the covers may be the best place to browse through this amusing mix of taxonomy and suggestive wordplay.

The first time I tried to watch Louis the 19th: King of the Air Waves, my television caught on fire. The second time I tried to watch Louis the 19th (on a new TV) it was without subtitles.

American Stories by Nagai Kafu (Columbia University Press) are about Kafu’s travels and studies in the United States. They were written in the first decade of the twentieth century but have only just been translated into English.

It is difficult to review this book because my brain is still reeling. “Deeply mind-blowing” are the words Matt Greening used to describe Cruddy by Lynda Barry (Simon & Schuster), and I cannot think of any more apt.

This Place Called Absence by Lydia Kwa (Turnstone) is another debut novel. It traces the lives of two ah ku (prostitutes) living in turn-of-the-century Singapore and intertwines their stories with that of Wu Lan, a Vancouver psychologist struggling to come to terms with her father’s suicide, and Wu Lan’s mother, who still lives in Singapore.

If you haven’t read a book with a horse sex scene before, Theresa Kishkan’s Sisters of Grass (Goose Lane) is one place to start. The story reconstructs the life of Margaret Stuart, a young woman living in the Nicola Valley of B.C. at the turn of the nineteenth century, who is an expert ranch hand and who falls in love with a visiting American anthropology student.

A Student of Weather (McClelland & Stewart), Elizabeth Hay’s first novel, follows a family from their Depression-era Saskatchewan farm to New York City to a comfortable neighbourhood in Ottawa. The story centres on the alienation between the two sisters of the Hardy family, who fall in love with the same man.

Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having to watch any fights. Home Ice by Craig Brunanski and A Town Called Hockey by Gary Jones, Liesl Lafferty and Richard Side are both littered with characters who are angry, drunk and bitter about the elusive dream of NHL stardom, and American interference in the game.

Aside from a grade school crush on Richard Brodeur, I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm for hockey, but when two hockey plays were running concurrently in Vancouver last winter I seized the chance to prove myself Canadian without having to watch any fights. Home Ice by Craig Brunanski and A Town Called Hockey by Gary Jones, Liesl Lafferty and Richard Side are both littered with characters who are angry, drunk and bitter about the elusive dream of NHL stardom, and American interference in the game.