A volunteer pass can also ease the way into the hard-to-get-into movies, such as the documentary The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, a detailed outline of B.C.’s marijuana industry, from growers and clippers to pharmaceutical companies.

The Havana restaurant on Commercial Drive was an appropriate choice of venue for My Name is Rachel Corrie, an intimate one-woman show adapted by Alan Rickman from the correspondence and journals of activist Rachel Corrie and presented by Teesri Duniya Theatre in association with neworldtheatre.

James Long’s essentially one-man show is thoughtfully and emotionally engaging, and immensely inventive. He uses three catalysts—a found suitcase full of photo albums, the same story retold by different people, and research for a play about a Japanese cannibal named Issei Sagawa—to explore questions of memory: how does memory work, what is the relationship between what was lived and what is remembered, and what is the value of mementos such as photos, for whom are they valuable?

Sean Horlor’s debut book of poetry, Made Beautiful by Use (Signature Editions), contains lines that must be read out loud. The line “cologne in glass bottles,” for example, is so simple; but say it, “cologne in glass bottles,” roll it around on your tongue, “cologne in glass bottles,” and it becomes a mantra.

This year, January in Vancouver was one long, dark rainy day. Thankfully the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival offered a variety of performances that piqued my curiosity enough to seduce me out of the house, away from the comforts of Kraft Dinner and CSI reruns. “I’m going to see The Black Rider again,” my friend John told me. “You have to come.”

In my life I have only written one fan letter that began: “I have never written a fan letter before.” It was addressed to Shane Rhodes, and I wrote it after reading his poetry collections Holding Pattern (NeWest Press) and The Wireless Room (NeWest Press). What struck me about the work was that the lines begged to be read out loud: to be repeated, to be chanted, to be heard.

While considering the list of writers interviewed for each volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) I couldn’t help thinking: “What an amazing literary gathering that would have been!” For the launch of volume i we can imagine a New York penthouse where a jazz trio plays Gershwin out on the terrace; inside, Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote make catty remarks about Ernest Hemingway, while Billy Wilder and James M. Cain knock back highballs and reminisce about their days writing dialogue for Double Indemnity back in 1944.

In Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (Douglas & McIntyre), Alberto Manguel gives us a biography of the two books that he feels have, “more than any others . . . fed the imagination of the Western world for over two and a half millennia.” Manguel recounts various theories on the origins of these epic poems, including Samuel Butler’s suggestion that Homer was “a young unmarried woman, and a native of Sicily.”

Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an 1890 edition that he had turned into a kind of commonplace book with the inclusion of “other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books.”

As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestinely as a forger of identity cards.