Andrew Struthers, The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan
Long story short, because the story (blog post) did get long: I enjoyed Andrew Struthers' The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan a lot, particularly its rambling, endlessly distracted approach to narrative. This memoir-ish book is full of characters that feel like Tofino, by which I mean both its stereotype and the people I've known from there. Genuinely, it's a window into the Tofino of 20 years ago that'll be familiar to those of us who've been around for a while, as well as an introduction for those who haven't. There's a thread here, even if it's thoroughly buried under Struthers' constant digressions, vignettes, and history, but 20 years after the book's initial publication, readers will appreciate the digressions more than the thread anyway. The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan remains a worthy West Coast read, much more than many of the more earnest such books that came out in the early years of the century. An unhelpfully long preamble As I said...
