It’s now two weeks until my UBC classes begin, and, with them, a new phase of my life. I realise also that as this happens the nature of this blog will change. Over the past few months I’ve thought about questions of identity and the shape of my life, sometimes through incidents that have happened to me or situations I have encountered, more often through books I have read. As

This August, I thought I’d spend my leisure time before the coming storm of study reading more about the place I live in. I began with Charles Demers’s Vancouver Special – short, quirky essays about Vancouver, which also contain references to other works. This led me to one of the books I’ll write about here, Mark Leier’s Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British