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The 12 books of Christmas

Retail stores are decking the halls, restaurants are booking parties, and neighbours are balanced precariously on ladders, adorning their homes with strings of lights.

Retail stores are decking the halls, restaurants are booking parties, and neighbours are balanced precariously on ladders, adorning their homes with strings of lights. With the holiday season right around the corner, it’s time for savvy shoppers to start compiling that all-important shopping list, and instead of resorting to the boring old scarf or gift certificate for your hard-to-buy-for brother or dad, why not offer up a literary gift: a book. We’ve compiled a list of 12 good reads for 12 different people on your shopping list, making two suggestions each week: husbands, wives, crazy uncles and aunts, teenage boys and girls, tiny tots, the boss, your American (pro-Obama) friend, the foodie, the family nature nut and local political junkie. Happy reading!

 

For the crazy uncle

Quicksilver: Book One of the Baroque Cycle

By Neal Stephenson

HarperCollins Publishers

944 pgs., $39.95

This book was picked up by accident while cruising the racks at the Whistler Public Library. Initially it was the shiny, silver cover that attracted me, as well as its girth — 900 pages from cover to cover. Perfect fall reading.

It didn’t take long to be absorbed by this book, which ranges from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s and the first book is focused on the activities and political intrigues surrounding the Royal Society of Natural Philosophers — a group that includes Isaac Newton, Gottfried Liebniz, Robert Hooke and others who pretty much invented physics, calculus, astronomy, optics, biology, chemistry, medicine, engineering and other high sciences, and who also dabbled in the corrupt but fashionable arts of alchemy and theatre from time to time to pay the bills.

This book combines snippets of history with a fictional narrative by MIT founder Daniel Waterhouse that is funny and compelling, amazingly detailed, and hints at a larger political plot unfolding that will one day split the society. In fact, all through the book you get the sense that these natural philosophers would rather be left alone, but their need for patrons and funding means they are continually drawn into international political intrigues as the British, Dutch, French and other nations battle for supremacy, while internal battles are waged for the crown.

There is the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, the Dutch East India Trading Company, the schism between papists and Protestants, piracy, slavery, revolution, sabotage — it’s a book that’s thick with the times on which it’s based.

The second book, which concerns the life and times of vagabond Jack Shaftoe and Eliza — the woman he rescues from a Turkish harem at the siege of Vienna — is less compelling than the first, but it’s still a good read and you can sense that Stephenson is building towards something spectacular in his Baroque Cycle .

There are many reasons this book stands out, not least Stephenson’s incredible writing and his uncanny ability to bring a mountain of research to life. He has a light touch with dense subjects, and his descriptions flow in a way that adds to the story instead of bogging it down. This is prose, pure and simple, and of a quality that few modern authors can match. Reading Stephenson calls to mind writers like Dickens and Melville, who at least had the benefit of living in the times they were writing about.

      Andrew Mitchell

 

The husband – “Don Cherry’s Hockey Stories”

 

By Jesse Ferreras

Don Cherry. Not since Pierre Trudeau has there been as divisive a personality in Canadian public life.

He’s been called everything from a racist to a blowhard, and he’ll probably admit to everything in between. At his core, though, Canada’s foremost hockey commentator is an honest man with a big heart, and it’s on display in “Don Cherry’s Hockey Stories and Stuff,” a perfect gift for a hockey-loving husband this Christmas.

No one ever accused Cherry of being a literary giant — least of all himself. And he doesn’t even try with this book, which reads like it was transcribed word-for-word from a conversation in a bar after a hockey game.

It isn’t so much a straight-forward narrative as short, memorable vignettes from Cherry’s career as a minor league player, coach of the Rochester Americans and Boston Bruins and later as a commentator for Hockey Night in Canada.

Some of the best stories describe the exploits of legendary players like Bobby Orr, who could pile up an opposing team in a corner of the ice and then score. Others happen off the ice, such as when Cherry talks about a clever contraption he created to keep beer cold on the team bus.

And then there’s the stories involving Blue, Cherry’s beloved mutt, who never started a fight but always won when propositioned — just like Cherry coached his players.

How much you enjoy the book depends entirely on how much you can stand the man. On TV he’s a boisterous, passionate, arm-waving, right wing hockey pundit who wears outrageous suits, and he’s no different in his book. Cherry might as well have spoken the whole thing and written it down later, mispronounced names and all.

And really, that’s what he’s aimed for here. Just like in his broadcasts, he shamelessly gets the players’ names wrong as he describes meeting people like “Corey” Price, the goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens. Either he meant to misspell the names or he provides a very convenient excuse for getting them wrong.

Overall, though, “Don Cherry’s Hockey Stories and Stuff” is a worthwhile read. The stories, while family-friendly, aren’t exactly the ones you read by the fireplace, but then again you should never expect to read about hockey as told by Margaret Atwood.

In this book Cherry tells it like it is, and for those who love the game, that’s more than enough.