What will our cities look like from a preteen's perspective in the not-too-distant future when peak oil pushes gas and food prices to new heights? No rides to the mall? No eating out? City-wide blackouts? Catastrophic! It was to Luz and her friends at first, but through a little bit of creativity and preteen gumption they discover the hidden potentials of an abandoned lot in their neighbourhood. Claudia Dávila's debut graphic novel, Luz Sees the Light, sets Luz and her friends on a path to transform their fossil-fueled world.

James Laxer's new book Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy pulls the curtain back to reveal the deliberately-obfuscated workings of the North American economy, and perhaps the best way for me to illustrate just how important a work I think he's wrought is by pulling back the curtain on my reviewing style: not one to mark up a book's margins with pen or pencil marks, I will sometimes opt for the subtle dog-earing of a page when I find a passage of note.

It's refreshing to see a new poet on the scene who brings a different perspective to the privileged life we live as Canadians. Salimah Valiani, a queer activist of colour, brings readers to different places with very different views on what it is to educate and challenge through poetry, letters and memoir.

Packed in the 150 pages that is Valiani's second, and newest, collection, Letter Out: Letter In, are memories, meditations and calls to action through radical thought and crisp sentences. The collection is split in four parts: Letter to South Africa; Letter to Canada; Letter to All; Letter Out: Letter In.

Overlapping interests -- young writers, the urban landscape and subversive art -- guided the Toronto's Steel Bananas art collective in producing GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose. The book's form, content and process were also inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's rhizome theory, where people and ideas are encouraged to be non-hierarchical and non-linear. Botanically, rhizomes grow horizontally, and their offshoots can begin and end anywhere.

Books are meant to be taken off the shelf and looked back on. So as we head into the last weeks of 2009 it’s time to take a look at all the progressive books released this year. The Book Lounge held a diverse array of literary works this year. Books this year explored foods leading to our demise, Canadians who have built our progressive movement, and reasons you may not want to take that cruise vacation. Take a look, there may be a book to enjoy some tea by this holiday season.

January :Christina McCall:'Feminist in arms'

Reviewed by Jessica Rose