Go: A Memoir of Movement by Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin
Go: A Memoir of Movement. Immediately, I love the engagement. As though joining something already in progress.
Bill Arnott’s Travel Beat
Taking A Chance: The First 25 Years of Fishers’ Loft Inn by John & Peggy Fisher and Roger Pickavance
More than a quarter century after their move to Port Rexton, the Fishers have produced a love letter to rural Newfoundland, sharing their firm belief in the wonderful things that can happen when you take a chance.
Travel: Figurative and Literal
Bill’s story Metaphoric was picked up for publication by Sojournal, an Australian magazine out of Sydney and he shares it here with his Northern Hemisphere readers
Field Notes on Listening by Kit Dobson
Field Notes on Listening is a response to our lack of connection to the land we call home, the difficult history of how many of us came to be here and what we could discover if we listened deeply to the world around us.
Trout Tracks by Jim McLennan
“Drawn from 55 years of excessive obsession with trout, water, streams, and flies, this collection of essays from Canada’s most widely read flyfishing author since Roderick Haig-Brown reveals the depth of engagement that this sport engenders. Poised and polished words reveal the flaws and virtues of humanity, the strength of Mother Nature, the beautiful mystery that is a wild trout, and the obsessed’s inexplicable need to outsmart a creature with a brain the size of a pea.”
French Dive: Living More with Less in the South of France by Eric Freeze
In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice, a medieval town-within-a-city on the famed Côte d’Azur. They’d bought a 700-square-foot dive, an apartment in need of renovation just a couple blocks from the Mediterranean.
Edward Feuz Jr.: A Story of Enchantment by D. L. Stephen
An intimate look at the life and climbs of Swiss alpine guide Edward Feuz Jr., patriarch of Canadian alpinism and genuine lover of mountains.
Fool’s Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver’s Official Town Fool by Jesse Donaldson
In Fool’s Gold, Donaldson explores the legacy of Joachim Foikis. On April 1, 1968, a tall, bespectacled, 35-year-old former social worker named Joachim Foikis received $3,500 from the Canada Council for the Arts in order to finance a unique, self-imposed mission unseen since Elizabethan England: reinvent the vanished tradition of “Town Fool.”
Trail Mix: 920 km on The Camino de Santiago by Jules Torti
A rollicking travel memoir that invites the curious, the initiated, and even the skeptics to tag along on the ever-changing landscape of “The Way”
Be Free: Mountains, Mishaps, and Miracles in Africa by Angela deJong
Be Free is a collection of personal travel essays that takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride across Africa as seen through the eyes of a solo female backpacker, Angela deJong.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Bill Arnott visits a Nanaimo BC bookshop and purchases a copy of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which he reviews here.
Bill Arnott’s Travel Beat: Talking Writing and Viking with the UK’s Alex Pearl
Bill Arnott’s Travel Beat: Talking Writing and Viking with the UK’s Alex Pearl.
No Thanks, I Want to Walk by Emily Taylor Smith
In Emily Taylor Smith’s latest adventure, walking the perimeter of New Brunswick and the Gaspé Peninsula, is another epic journey for the record books.
Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin
Bill encounters the #1 international best-seller, Fresh Water for Flowers, an intimately told story about a woman who defiantly believes in happiness, despite it all.
The Sun is a Compass by Caroline Van Hemert
In Comox, I stopped at Blue Heron Books, where I picked up Caroline Van Hemert’s The Sun is a Compass, her personal account of travelling, along with her husband, for five months by rowboat, kayak, raft, foot, ski, and sled from Washington State to Alaska, crossing Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories in the process.
