Bruce Grierson's 3 favorite reads in 2023

On May 3, 2016, the entire population of Fort MacMurray, Alberta—an oil town of 90,000—was evacuated as a wildfire dubbed “the Beast” jumped the river, rolled through town, and laid waste to pretty much every stick of those people’s built lives, leaving incalculable grief and a dark cloak of portent over the 21st century.

Valliant’s read-it-through-your-fingers account of the fire itself, plus his dissection of the devil’s deals we’ve made with the petrochemical industry, make this book an instant classic. It’ll be talked about in 100 years. (If, that is, people are still around to talk about it.)

Okay, that’s hyperbole. But Fire Weather gets you thinking that way – in extremities. Which is arguably the way we should be thinking. Because complacency isn’t working for us all that great.

This quirky little novel, about a churchgoer who becomes part of her congregation’s “search committee” to pick a new minister, has hidden depths.

Partly it’s about faith (and one in particular – Unitarian Universalism). But what it’s really about is consensus. And what hard work that process is. Surprisingly, arriving at a compromise solution that may not be everyone’s first choice but that everyone can live with, requires one or a few people to emerge as leaders. And a wise choice depends on folks being open to each others’ insights. Compromise is an exercise in intellectual humility.

Timely, right?

Also: the protagonist is a food critic. Expect to gain five pounds.

I first encountered Mooney’s writing when he was a sports reporter covering my local squad, the Vancouver Canucks, and in that role he was milk-out-your-nose hilarious. It oughtn’t to be surprising that all that inconsequential mirth came from a darker place.

In this memoir, Mooney describes the life of a Black boy growing up in a white household in 1980s British Columbia. His birth mom, a teenager in the foster system, gave him up for adoption, and that’s all he was told until he one day decided to do some sleuthing.

The book explores the moral crime of transplanting people into a new culture without their consent. The graft may look like it’s taking, but that’s only because you aren’t looking at the level of the soul: the damage redounds down the generations. A hard and important read. (And, mercifully, funny too at times.)