BC Bestseller List

The top five books on the BC Bestseller list for the week of November 11th, 2012. This province’s readers are clearly an eclectic bunch, kale-eating truck enthusiasts who enjoy a good love story!   1. Unlikely Love Stories  Mike McCardell,  Harbour Publishing With a rare gift for bringing out the magic in everyday situations, Mike turns the spotlight on all the little, seemingly insignificant things that make life fascinating. His touching stories resonate with simple truths about people and the world that we live in. As much as his good-news TV reports have become a BC institution, his annual collections have become a Christmas tradition. With close to 70,000 copies sold, the books have contributed over $80,000 to Variety—The Children’s Charity.           This book is a celebration of The Vancouver Sun’s first 100 years. It tells the story of Vancouver and the world through the eyes of a newspaper. Decade by decade, it provides fascinating stories from the sinking of the Titanic (just two months after its first issue), through wars, riots, parades, Royal visits and the Olympic Games. Filled with stunning images shot by The Sun’s award winning photographers, the book runs the gamut from classic front pages to decades-old advertisements.         Here, kale-evangelist Sharon Hanna provides more than eighty simple but superb recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Wilted Kale with Caramelized Parsnips, Pizzocheri Noodles with Greens and Fontina, Kale and Potato Torta and Kale in Coconut Milk with Salmon Candy will blow kale skeptics out of the kitchen. This garden-to-kitchen guide gives readers all they need to know to grow this super-sustainable crop organically—as edible landscaping, on balconies and boulevards and even indoors. And, aspiring locavores take note—purple, silvery-green, frilly, stately Tuscan and rainbow-hued kale can all be grown year-round throughout North America, helping families save hundreds of dollars a year on grocery bills.     In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance, while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging’s environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts.           Accompanied by hundreds of previously unpublished archival and contemporary photographs, award-winning historian Daniel Francis delivers a fascinating account of the last hundred years of trucking in BC. From hair-raising tales of the road by trucking legends like the scholarly Andy Craig and the bombastic Cog Harrington to important infrastructure projects and vital innovations for the future, here is a story never told before—a road less travelled, so to speak—but an important and an exciting chapter in British Columbia’s history.