The PNE (Pacific National Exhibition) is a Vancouver tradition, an annual fair started in 1910 that is famous for its farm animals, dog trick shows, and amusement park—highlighted by Canada's oldest wooden roller coaster still in existence. In 1980, when Nick Marino was twelve years old, he started working at the PNE and quickly learned that there was more to the fair than winning stuffed animals and eating mini donuts. He had to contend with belligerent bosses, unhinged carnies, and teenage hustlers. In East Side Story, a funny, charming memoir of fair life, Marino revisits the "Wild West" of the city's East Side, home to the PNE, sharing stories from his six summers working at the fair, where arcade bouncers went on midnight roller coaster rides, riots broke out at concerts, and local kids helped themselves to everything. With beguiling and at times poignant humour, he pulls back the curtain on the culture of carnivals and fairs, an unpredictable and eternally young world of players, scammers, and dreamers.

In this recommended reading list, Marino recommends some of his favourite and most influential books.

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My Year of the Racehorse, by Kevin Chong

About the book: The story of a man, a horse, and a foul-mouthed trainer in the (once) glamorous world of horse racing.

Kevin Chong has grand plans. He draws up a to-do list of major milestones that will give him the life he always wanted—and the life that will inspire awe and envy in his friends. Then Chong makes an unconventional decision: he buys a racehorse. He becomes part-owner. Just don't ask him which part. Thus Chong meets Blackie, the horse that will win his heart, even if she doesn't always win the race. He meets Randi, the cantankerous trainer with a heart of gold. He meets assorted characters who work, live, and drink at the track. And, one by one, the items on his to-do list are replaced with horse-related ambitions.

Written with keen observational humour, My Year of the Racehorse is strewn with fascinating tidbits and infused with the excitement and faded glamour of the horse-racing world. Ultimately, it is the moving tale of a young man's discovery that a meaningful life can arise from the most unexpected of circumstances.

*

Vancouver Special, by Charles Demers

About the book: Vancouver is at a crossroads in its history—host to the 2010 Winter Olympics and home to the poorest neighbourhood in Canada; a young, multicultural city with a vibrant surface and a violent undercoat; a savvy urban centre with an inferiority complex.

In Vancouver Special, writer and performer Charles Demers examines the who, what, where, when, why, and how of Vancouver, shedding light on the various strategies and influences that have made the city what it is today (as well as what it should be). From a history of anti-Asian racism to a deconstruction of the city's urban sprawl; from an examination of local food trends to a survey of the city's politically radical past, Vancouver Special is a love letter to the city, taking a no-holds-barred look at Lotusland with verve, wit, and insight.

*

What I Think Happened: An Underresearched History of the Western World, by Evany Rosen

About the book: A wickedly funny book in which the author recasts historical events and personalities from her own feminist perspective.

What I Think Happened, the debut book by comedian Evany Rosen, is really two books: a savvy, no-holds-barred romp through the history of the western world, and the personal story of a self-described "failed academic" who recasts historiography from a feminist perspective—albeit an underqualified and overconfident one.

In these wide-ranging comic essays, Evany explores numerous historical events and personalities that have had a personal impact on her as she attempts to understand why they've been the object of such fascination, from her unnatural obsession with Napoleon, to her misguided understanding of the Royal Family, to her intrigue over America's dumpiest presidents. Evany's approach to history is to make it personal, which any good historian will tell you is exactly what not to do; but in doing so, and with whimsy and irreverence, she rescues history from the dusty confines of "intellectually aggressive" men and makes it fun again.

*

The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. The Clark Park Gang, by Aaron Chapman

About the book: Decades before organized crime syndicates brought sensational drug wars to Vancouver, street gangs held sway over its unruly east side. None was considered tougher or more feared than the Clark Park gang, a wild, two-fisted crew of characters from Vancouver's post-1960s counterculture.

In 1972, after a number of headline-making riots and clashes with police—including an infamous altercation outside a Rolling Stones concert—the Clark Parkers became the target of a secret undercover police squad. Their hostile interactions culminated in a notorious police shooting, resulting in the death of a Clark Park gang member.

Combining meticulous research with a keen flair for storytelling, The Last Gang in Town features previously unpublished photos and police documents, as well as testimonials by surviving gang members and police officers who speak for the first time on the subject. The book is a compelling portrait of early-1970s Vancouver and an intriguing and sensational history that puts the spotlight on the after-dark underbelly of the city's not-so-distant criminal past.

*

The Outer Harbour, by Wayde Compton

About the book: In his debut story collection, poet Wayde Compton explores the concept of place and identity in which characters and space merge to make narrative. These interconnected stories, imbued with the colour of speculative fiction, are towering in their conceits. As much as characters are revealed by what they do and say, in The Outer Harbour, places also speak, in the way that they shape us.

One strand of stories follows the relationship between an artist obsessed with shipping containers and a drug-addicted student, each of mixed-race, who seek in art a response to unclear identities. Another set of stories follows the geological development of a volcanic island in Burrard Inlet—Vancouver's harbour—which becomes the site of a radical Indigenous occupation, and later, in increasingly absurd shadings, a real estate development, and then a detention centre for illegal migrants. And a final suite tells the story of Donald and Albert, biracial conjoined twins, and their father, an eccentric figure whose enigmatic expression divides them.

Moving from 2001 through to 2025, The Outer Harbour is at once a history book and a cautionary tale of the future. Collectively, these stories condense and confound our preconceived ideas around race, migration, and home, creating a singular world in a city built on the legacies of racism and colonialism, hurtling towards a future both impossible and inevitable.

*

The Comedians, by Kliph Nesteroff

About the book: In The Comedians, comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff brings to life a century of American comedy with real-life characters, forgotten stars, mainstream heroes and counterculture iconoclasts. Based on over two hundred original interviews and extensive archival research, Nesteroff’s groundbreaking work is a narrative exploration of the way comedians have reflected, shaped, and changed American culture over the past one hundred years.

Starting with the vaudeville circuit at the turn of the last century, Nesteroff introduces the first stand-up comedian—an emcee who abandoned physical shtick for straight jokes. After the repeal of Prohibition, Mafia-run supper clubs replaced speakeasies, and mobsters replaced vaudeville impresarios as the comedian’s primary employer. In the 1950s, the late-night talk show brought stand-up to a wide public, while Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Jonathan Winters attacked conformity and staged a comedy rebellion in coffeehouses. From comedy’s part in the Civil Rights movement and the social upheaval of the late 1960s, to the first comedy clubs of the 1970s and the cocaine-fueled comedy boom of the 1980s, The Comedians culminates with a new era of media-driven celebrity in the twenty-first century.

*

Five Little Indians, by Michelle Good

About the book: Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention.

Alone and without any skills, support or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn’t want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission.

Fuelled by rage and furious with God, Clara finds her way into the dangerous, highly charged world of the American Indian Movement. Maisie internalizes her pain and continually places herself in dangerous situations. Famous for his daring escapes from the school, Kenny can’t stop running and moves restlessly from job to job—through fishing grounds, orchards and logging camps—trying to outrun his memories and his addiction. Lucy finds peace in motherhood and nurtures a secret compulsive disorder as she waits for Kenny to return to the life they once hoped to share together. After almost beating one of his tormentors to death, Howie serves time in prison, then tries once again to re-enter society and begin life anew.

With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the desperate quest of these residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and, ultimately, find a way forward.

*

The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein

About the book: In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of one the most dominant ideologies of our time: Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.

At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

*

The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, by Joe Ollman

About the book: The daring and destructive life of the man who popularized the word “zombie.”

In the early twentieth century, travel writing represented the desire for the expanding bourgeoisie to experience the exotic cultures of the world past their immediate surroundings. Journalist William Buehler Seabrook was emblematic of this trend—participating in voodoo ceremonies, riding camels cross the Sahara desert, communing with cannibals and most notably, popularizing the term “zombie” in the West. A string of his bestselling books show an engaged, sympathetic gentleman hoping to share these strange, hidden delights with the rest of the world. He was willing to go deeper than any outsider had before. But, of course, there was a dark side. Seabrook was a barely functioning alcoholic who was deeply obsessed with bondage and the so-called mystical properties of pain and degradation. His life was a series of travelling highs and drunken lows; climbing on and falling off the wagon again and again. What led the popular and vivid writer to such a sad state?

Cartoonist Joe Ollmann spent seven years researching Seabrook’s life, interviewing surviving family and accessing long neglected archives, in order to piece together the peripatetic life of a forgotten American writer. Often weaving in Seabrook’s own words and those of his biographers, Ollmann’s The Abominable Mr. Seabrook posits Seabrook the believer versus Seabrook the exploiter, and leaves the reader to consider where one ends and the other begins.

*

Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro

About the book: Lives of Girls and Women is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.

As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body’s insistent desires, and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood.