Kathleen Molloy

Hello readers of Kathleen Molloy’s blog…

As you will know, I am the guest blogger (although a little slow getting started!).  Not only am I a guest blogger but this is my first time blogging!  The title may have given this away!

It is oddly exposing to think about having my words be read by strangers or ‘friends who I haven’t met, yet’ (this may be another way of saying the same thing).  I now know what authors, like Kathleen Molloy, may feel when they put their heart, soul and thoughts into print for others to read, enjoy or criticize.

In keeping with the broad area of topics for the blog, I have decided to do a review of a review I recently read in the Globe & Mail’s Book section.  I thought this a fitting way to contribute to a literary blog.

The book is Elizabeth Pisani’s The Wisdom of Whores and it was reviewed by Stephen Lewis.  Yes, that Stephen Lewis, the UN’s AIDS Envoy for Africa.

Elizabeth Pisani’s book, as the Stephen Lewis notes, is an insightful examination of the global impact of HIV.  The unique thing about it is that it moves beyond medical, scientific and demographic information to examine HIV from those who have experience living with it.  Elizabeth’s subject also come from unlikely sources such as brothels in Indonesia.

The book reveiw is brilliant and if someone with such knowledge on the topic of HIV, such as Stephen Lewis, comments that the book had changed even his mind about how the world can look at HIV, then it is a noteworthy read.  It will be on my shopping list the next time I head to my favourite bookseller.

Guest Blogger

Bryan Hamberg

The Butterfly Confidential blogspot wants to know if Canadians read for humour’s sake. She lamented that her local public library stocked very few Canadian funnies. What is a girl to do when she needs a good Canuck chuckle?

Well, she could print of the past winners of the Stephan Leacock awards from 1925 – to present, march into her indie bookstore and demand that they stock every title.

http://www.leacock.ca/

She could take said list and beg her book crossing buddies to trade said titles.

She could present said list to her favourite librarian and suggest that they install a Canuck Chuckle Corner.

She could scout the big chain bookstore monopolies for misfiled Canadian titles and ever-so-delicately shelf them with the US big names under the humour flag.

Maybe you have a few suggestions?

http://butterflyconfidential.blogspot.com/2008/07/reading-for-humor.html

Wendy from our west wonders:

“I wonder if there were any bookcrossing books in that pile?  It would be great to get some catches in Afghanistan.”

She is referencing the 6,000 books readers sent to Canadian Troops overseas. In the box I packed I book crossed about 24 Canadian authors and threw in some pulp favourites from my beau. I agree, it would be really neat to see some of these books journaled on www.bookcrossing.com

That’s bibliokarma!

This is the sixth west Quebec author I have read for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge.

Kiss the Sunset Pig, Lauire Gough

Since moving to Quebec I have discovered that everyone in Guelph Ontario adores Laurie Gough. I know this because whenever I meet someone from Guelph they assume “Oh, you must know my dear friend Laurie.” And when my dear friends from Guelph hop over the bridge for a visit they always pre-arrange a tea date with Laurie and her family. Laurie Gough collects good people.

Having finished reading Kiss the Sunset Pig I now know that Laurie has managed to collect good people from around the world. In her first book of travel adventures, Laurie squeezes us into her beat up old Bronco named Marcia. We accompany her on a road trip across the United States, pass the non-descript strip malls, pass the Plains, pass the bigger-than-life Americans… all the way to California. She’s looking for a cave in which she spent some time during her youth, a time when she felt safe and certain of who she was and what she wanted.

Laurie’s first trip to the cave was in her twenties, she wrote this travel log in her thirties, and she now bounces happily into her forties. Yet although we know she is a mature adult woman it is still impressive to read how she described her journey from who she thought she was en route to becoming who she wants to be.

And isn’t travelling as much about what we learn from the world as it is what we learn about ourselves? On this adventure Laurie learned that she could be happily independent, happily in love with Mr. Right if she ran him over, and profoundly lonely and isolated.

As she described her misgivings about her Korea trip I remembered the complete isolation I also felt when holed up in a Seoul hotel for three days.

My return flight from Singapore was delayed for two days because of jam. Not an air traffic jam but raspberry jam. Crates of raspberry jam had crashed in the cargo, spilling a gooey mess and forcing the passengers to sleep in the airport for 2 days while the airline searched a jam-free flight for us. It was impossible to get information from the airlines. Impossible to escape old Korean ladies body slamming their way to the front of the line. After being knocked around a line-up for almost 12 hours I finally reached the ticket counter where I pressed my elbows down flat, stretched my arms the width of the counter and spied the ticket agent dead on. He couldn’t have possibly ignored me. Yet he did. And this was because an old lady wedged herself in between the counter and my breasts. She had ducked under the stinky gap of my armpit and settled comfortably between me and the counter. My stunned response to the invasion didn’t last long and I barely got out an “Uhh excuse me,” before a second old lady joined her. Now, I must confess, I never was a girl blessed by the Hooter Fairy, so it is hard to imagine how two grown women could nestle in between my boobs. But they did and the ticket agent didn’t flinch.

My travel mates and I were shuttled to a suburban hotel where we spent 3 nights eating noodles and watching American GI TV. Just as Laurie described it, for me Seoul was bleak, crowded, overcast, polluted and… did I mention crowded? In that suburban hotel I was isolated. I woke with panic attacks fearing that the airline would lose all records of my existence and forget me there. On night two I had a nightmare that the American soldiers had taken over the city and in response the Koreans slaughtered foreigners in the street. Screaming myself awake I had only my purse and the airline-issued tooth brush to fend off the nightmares. Fortunately the hotel laundered my clothes every night but during those hours when they bleached my jeans, I can honestly say that I felt naked, my soul, my hope, my common sense - all gone.

Like Laurie, I’ve had the opportunity to explore much of this world and I’ve made some curious and oft times unhealthy travel choices. Part of the adventure right? But I have never felt as lonely and vulnerable as I did in the Korean suburb, naked, with only a tooth brush and David Letterman.

Kiss the Sunset Pig is not so much about hitchhiking through Sumatra, canoeing in the Yukon, sleeping in a redwood tree…as it is about yearning to find yourself somewhere else. Let’s see where Laurie’s next adventure takes her.

http://www.lauriegough.com/books.html

And who wants to Kiss the Sunset Pig of the title? Singer Joni Mitchell does.

http://top5.weblog.ro/2008-04-28/355177/California—Joni-Mitchell.html

I’ve picked another YA novel for the 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge.West Quebecer Catherine Joyce’s gives us Psyche’s Children.I squirreled away in my mother’s old boat to read this one. I don’t know how many books I read in that boat as a teen. Eighty million? When the other teens on Georgian Bay were water skiing during the day and getting plastered on the beach at night, I was reading. Writing too, always writing, but mostly reading. In my youth I never slipped away for moonlit petting sessions with hunky cottagers. I didn’t lie, do drugs, or collect messed up friends. I guess I wasn’t much of a worry for my folks; I wasn’t much of a teen. For this reason, when I picked up Pyche’s Children I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to read it with my still vibrant rose-coloured remembrances of teenagerhood. I liked being a teen. I liked that my family encouraged me to make healthy decisions, that my friends respected me, that I respected myself. I’m happy to say that I have no teen angst poetry that needs to be burned when I’m rich and famous. I had no teen angst. Incredible? Believable? I’m afraid it’s true, my formative years were perfect. Happy happy memories. As I slowly became introduced to the girls in Psyche’s Children I was thrown back into high school.  And I’m ashamed to say that it was the first time I felt sorry for some of the girls I barely knew in my old school, or knew through friends of friends of friends, or passed in the halls and ignored. Unlike the girls in the story and I see now… unlike some girls in my old high school, I never cut class to have casual sex. I never bumped into a gang of bullies stomping another girl in the middle of the road in the middle of the day. I never had to worry about what I wanted to be when I grew up, fear that I wouldn’t get into university, or face the fact that I had nothing in common with my family.  And I never had a friend who cut herself to ooze the pain out. 

The next time one of my girlfriends confides that she doesn’t know what her teenage daughter is thinking, I’m going to suggest that they read Catherine Joyce. Coinciding with her writing career, Catherine works with youth at risk, including anorexic and bulimic girls.

 http://www.catherinejoyce.ca/

Quille and Quire’s blog posted some of their favourite book covers. Like any normal reader, I judge every book by the cover!

Now I ask you, what do you think about the idea of creating a series of covers to brand a common look and feel? McClelland & Stewart has done a great job with The New Canadian Library. Some of the covers are gorgeous and the clean look is very attractive. http://www.mcclelland.com/NCL/index.html

Yet, somehow I feel cheated. Are the stories overshadowed by the marketing? Will booksellers line them up like boxes of cereal? Do readers collect books like kids collect hockey cards, because they look nice? I don’t know.

For me, the covers tell half the story – up front. I’m afraid that if I see a shelf of the new New Canadian Library covers I’ll float by it.

With that said, I love that Quille and Quire posted 5 of their recent favourites –all unique and original. It  helps remind us about the unique talents of Canadian cover designers, who make Canadian covers unique.

http://www.quillandquire.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/09/favourite-canlit-covers/

Now that’s bibliokarma!

Wow, over 6,000 books received in Nipissing-Timiskaming for MP. Anthony Rota to share with Canadian troops overseas. Well done!

http://www.baytoday.ca/content/news/details.asp?c=26787

Mid-summer you will be treated to posts from my favourite guest blogger Bryan Hamberg. You will remember Bryan as one of the readers I invited to participate in the book launch of Dining with Death. During the launch, three readers joined me at the front of the crowd to read their favourite bits aloud. Take a look at the website for a picture of the guest readers to confirm that Bryan is the most handsome fellow in the lot. 

We all know he’s a great guest reader but is he a great guest blogger? Let me let you in on a little secret… Bryan has an editor’s eye. For Dining with Death he measured Canadian content and composted Americanisms. In my mind Bryan may be Canada’s foremost upholder of the letter U; making sure it fits nicely where it belongs in all Canadian text. 

If he was a superhero I would call him The Patriot. But as far as superheroes go, I don’t think he’d be the flying kind. It would be pretty darn difficult to fly when you’re lugging around so many books. Bryan loves books; he drags Canadian authors all over the world when travels and then dumps them unceremoniously for others to enjoy in his wake. He’s currently devouring Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Last Light of the Sun and I suspect he’ll dump Guy Gavriel Kay somewhere in Guadeloupe when he is ready to pass the book along. In the meantime, he’s staying put here in Canada, ready to brandish his letter U. Join me in welcoming The Patriot as my favourite guest blogger.

The Dalnews asks  “What work of Canadian fiction would you recommend?”http://dalnews.dal.ca/2008/07/03/discuss-Canlit.htmlIn Autumn 2007 my sister treated me to a trip to Kingston Ontario for my birthday. We stayed at B&B, drank wine on terraces surrounding the fresh market, and lost ourselves in Kingston’s many, many bookstores. I picked up a 1970s reprint of Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice, (Macmillan of Canada, Toronto: 1956.) and the bookseller sighed. “It’s so nice,” he dusted off the blue clothe cover “that people are reading Adele again.”

The way he spoke of the author like a misplaced lover made me wonder exactly at what point Adele Wiseman fell out of fashion. To that extent was she ever in fashion beyond the academic circles? It was evident that he didn’t merely like the work but he was fond of the author.

As I read The Sacrifice I tried to do so in spurts. I didn’t want to read too much in one setting because, frankly, I didn’t want it to end. It really was a nice story about one new Canadian family making their way in their new world, in a community that treated them as others. It was a community of their own people – a home within a home, with a locked door.

The way in which Wiseman handled the father’s pride was tender and troubling. And in my opinion, it is perhaps our best example of the portrayal and betrayal of the family in CanLit.

You may have seen this on the New York Times Sunday book Reviewhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/books/review/Alford-t.html?_r=2&ref=books&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

and then again on BookNinja

http://www.bookninja.com/

but LitGiggles need to be shared. Happily 90% of the world’s translator make authors look good. Some however, make the author’s work look goofy.  But I could live with looking goofy for the opportunity to be translated into Norwegian!   A sampling of some wacky translations compiled by the New York Times …3. James Finn Garner dedicated his best seller “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” to his wife, Lies (pronounced “lease”), which is the Dutch equivalent of Elizabeth. In the Norwegian edition, the book’s dedication reads:a) “This book is dedicated to Untruths, for everything”
b) “For Dissembling, my everything”
c) “For Rental Unit, my north star”
d) “Lies Flat, I can’t live without you”