What we read tells us who we are. What can we learn about East Cafe’s patron readers? The following is a sample of their latest obsessions. I hope you find a book that connects with you – more so, I hope this list helps you connect with the people flipping the pages. It isn’t an exhaustive list. If you’d like to be included in this community, comment below. Tell us what you are reading and what it’s about.

Image: Melanie Kage

Andrei is reading Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the latest work by queer feminist philosopher Judith Butler. The book explores how “gender becomes a phantasm.” Gender – in the imaginings of the “reactionary right-wing” – turns from empowering self-expression to a haunting specter, who then goes on to enact further violence on those already suffering under patriarchy and heteronormativity. Not an easy read, but in these times? Necessary.

Jack is a “book lover and science fiction connoisseur,” presently reading Leo Tolstoy’s tragic tale of love and loss, Anna Karenina. He compares it to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: there is a plot, there are characters, things happen, but really, “it’s about Russia.” Despite not being a “light read,” he says, it’s “funnier than expected.”

The following people chose pseudonyms.

“Susie” is reading Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. A “moving, depressing” work of historical fiction about the Japanese occupation of Korea. Recommended by a friend, and now she recommends it to us. “It’s hard to be a woman.” It also has “great acting”, she says, citing from a review of the 2022 Apple TV+ adaptation.

“Talia” from Beirut rediscovered the Turkish classic Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali. Social media can do some accidental good. It’s an epistolary novel set in interwar Europe, but its themes of “social status and class and gender” ring just as true today. Talia found herself identifying with the protagonist, even though she “doesn’t usually read men.” She’s on the hunt for autofiction, a genre that blends fiction and memoir.

Image: Melanie Kage

After reading something emotionally heavy, “Mal” wanted a feel-good pick-me-up. She landed on A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Mal places it in the “hopepunk” literary movement, characterized by change, optimism, and hope for our collective future. Psalm forefronts the otherwise downplayed struggles of our modern life: “What it takes to feel satisfied.” What happens if we chase something and finally find success, only to end up regretting it? Well, it’s never too late. Begin a new journey. “It also has robots and monks.”

Finally, Shrinal, the photographer for The East Cafe Chronicles. He’s on the second book, Words of Radiance, of the high-fantasy series The Stormlight Archive, by American author Brandon Sanderson. It’s “easy reading” – you can shut off your mind and get lost in a “cool fantasy.” Sometimes, that’s exactly what we need.

It’s roughly sorted by vibe and bpm. Otherwise, it’s a wild ride through decades and genres over the course of one hour. Enjoy!

For Spotify users:

For Apple users: Click here!

Image: Melanie Kage

Norman is an original East Ender. Born and raised in Hastings-Sunrise, on the “wrong side of the tracks” like so many of us. To immigrant parents, with immigrant friends, all cash-poor but class-conscious. He learns early the one lesson of such life, why some “have so much”, and others not enough. It comes down to class, you see. It’s why the yuppies and “middle-class Kitsilano hippies” turn up their noses at us, the “great unwashed”. But don’t let that get you down. We make our own history, our own future. The soul of the neighborhood is its people, not their bank accounts. The beating, bleeding heart that keeps a neighborhood alive is hidden away in the old places, the memories etched on those walls, scribbled on those tables.

Norman remembers it clearly from the journals and diaries he kept since he was six years old. He remembers the backyard ski hills of winter and the bicycle rides of summer. He remembers running away upon hearing the Clark Park Gang coming, but he remembers that terror with fondness. He remembers teenage rebellions, running from cops, jumping train tracks, the manifestos and essays — Why I Am an Anarchist, published in the school newspaper. As Norman gets older, he organizes communities and unions, edits radical journals, and works a dozen different jobs, from gondola pilot to ditch digger, spreading his message of solidarity. In his hands, writing turns to a potent weapon to wreak change as he “weaves strikes and protests into his stories.” The goal: to beat back the forces of gentrification, ring the death knell of neoliberal capitalism.

Video/Image: Melanie Kage

Rarely, though, do things go the way we thought they would in our twenties. Unceasing, unrelenting, Vancouver marches down the path of austerity. Old family homes are torn down for prefab condos; they’re speculative assets to be flipped on the markets, too small, too lifeless to build a life. Family-run stores are replaced by faceless multinationals, tables and floors and walls wiped of all memories. Norman gets his heart broken. He leaves. Montreal is the city of big social change, offering a new start and a fighting spirit. What he couldn’t do for his first love, he does for his second. He blossoms into a writer, artist, and activist.

But he misses Hastings-Sunrise “every day”. He misses it all: “the people, the mountains, the air.” He talks of the past longingly, with a breaking voice, because the East End he loved is gone. He doesn’t recognize it anymore. A home here is a luxury he can’t afford. His home exists “only in memories”. In “lost stories” on the pages of old, yellowed journals; in the photos on his kitchen wall in Montreal, which became a memorial to the Vancouver that once was. He writes about that loss in his books, from Vancouvered Out to The East End Rules. Fiction, yes, but fiction that is “fun” and “rings true”, fiction whose truth you feel in your “gut”. Fiction that tells us it doesn’t have to be this way. Fiction that fights back. His writing is tied to his political activism.

Image: Melanie Kage

Resistance is not just political; resistance is creative. Resistance is here, Norman says, in neighborhood newsletters such as The East Cafe Chronicles. Resistance is in the morning meetups at a cozy neighborhood cafe. Resistance is in our sacrifice to keep the neighborhood alive. To keep it special. To keep it ours. The parties, the lobbyists, the political action committees can “go jump a bridge”. We don’t need them. We are the East Enders, we say that with pride. We are the East End, its self and soul.

Photo: Melanie Kage

Simmers, like many of us, covets community. She wants to be a regular somewhere, her name known, called out from the sea of unfamiliar faces. That space is Hastings-Sunrise, the “two-storey strip/[…] of blocks still a livable scale”. The collection reflects the quiet rejection of the neighborhood it serenades — the neighborhood that says no to the city that surrounds it. A shortcut is turned into a mini-park with benches and flowers, book boxes spread word of unofficial block parties, and old men shuffle around parks, morning and night. The people, she writes, who “perch at our perimeters”, who we pass every day on our way to work or play “become our landscape”. They turn these four blocks into a “hood” — a place for us, by us, that protects us but needs to be protected in turn.

The city sees this influx of young professionals exiting their youth, choosing comfort and camaraderie, and it pounces on the opportunity to gentrify a new neighborhood. It rebrands Hastings-Sunrise to East Village. The city flaunts this “overlooked gem” and touts it as a “pedestrian hub” for the yuppies with designer dogs and hipster toques — those seeking yet another street with nothing but sophisticated boutiques and gluten-free bakeries. All while the old businesses that gave the neighborhood this shine — shops set up over decades by generations of immigrants — struggle to stay afloat. All while the tenants that turned cold concrete and abandoned pavements to shared backyards “dig [in] trenches” to protect the one place where they could make a home without ever owning a house.

Image: Source

Hastings-Sunrise is the “odd crow in counterflow”, the one that leaves the flock to “scavenge a different wealth/from notes, berries, books.” Hastings-Sunrise is a celebration of all of us countercrows, those who refuse the call of the daily grind and seek a different fortune: more sleep, less stress, enough, not excess.

There is a note of melancholy to the poetry collection, an undercurrent of loneliness and a questioning of our shared struggle to resist, to refuse, these grand currents of our time. “[W]e plan/to live here forever”, she writes, “even if/we may not stay for good”. But despite this supposed inevitability of change, it is still a call to action, to protect that which we cherish.

Now, it is up to us not to let her poetry become a dirge.

By Rishi Mittal