Kathleen Molloy

At the beginning of this year, Christine from the blog She Reads Books included Dining with Death as one of her Best Books of 2008. It was around this time last year that she enjoyed Dining with Death and with her review I happily borrowed the description:

“A blood-and-guts, bitter love-song to ageing”

She her full review on the website www.diningwithdeath.ca and her blog.
Naturally, Christine devoured a number of favourite books last year including Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s wonderful to be in such good company alongside Nabokov!

Well, to be honest, it isn’t all Manitobans and it isn’t exactly me in particular. To be clear… some Manitobans are making guests at the 2009 World Horror Convention barf their guts out.

Have you ever been so scared that you vomited? If not, you’ll need to attend this convention for no other reason than to participate in their Gross Out competition. Writers are given three minutes to tell a scary story – a story that will turn your insides out!

Winnipeg, Manitoba

World Horror Convention

April 30 ~ May 3, 2009

Theme: In the Dead of Winter, Hear the Wind Scream

For readers that were unable to stomach, er follow the 2009 Canada Reads showdown don’t miss Steven W. Beattie’s annual post-comp wrap-up on his That Shakespeherian Rag blog.

I am now officially hooked on Book Radio. As I cruise around western Quebec and eastern Ontario I set my satellite radio to stations dedicated to talking about books. Books read over the air, author interviews, book club discussions, book to film / film to book, …I can’t get enough of it and I continually flip back and forth between bookish broadcasts.

I love it.

Most of it.

Okay, some of it.

To be frank, I love the idea that people are talking about books more than the actual reading of some of the books.

Sorry to admit it, hateful to suggest it, but a lot of the books read on the air are rarely the type that I would sign out from the library. I find some of them… how should I put this… LAZY.

For example, last week I rolled my eyes when the narrator wasted “languid” in an otherwise perfectly good sentence. When the narrative read “languid” again four lines later I flipped the channel.

                  “His languid gaze…” and then

                  “The languid breeze…”

I try to not be a word snob. Yet,  I do like to read / hear words that are well played.  The “languid Federal Budget” tells me more of a story behind the story than a spiritless gaze or a lackluster breeze. I want to be challenged while listening to a story in the same way I am challenged while reading a story.

But is this a case of Beggers Can’t be Chosers? While I appreciate having access to book radio, I hate having to stomach lazy writing.

Please don’t tell me I am doomed to suffer languid listening every time I turn the radio on. I encourage you to lobby your favourite bookish radio station to slip some CanLit into their play list.

And if I ever use “languid” in a story, please feel free to frown openly. If I use it twice, go ahead and scold my proof readers. Linda Erskine, Kae McColl, and Anne Gros know better than to let me get away with that.

In the interviews following Nino Ricci’s win of the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Fiction, Ricci spoke about the research he did in preparation of The Origin of Species. Ricci had the opportunity to travel to the Galapagos to devour the region first hand.

In his new novel Shuck, Montreal’s Daniel Allen Cox provides an introduction into the life of a gay Canadian sex worker in New York.

I’m no expert on cross-border over-the-fence porn. But my mother is.

I don’t know when she started collecting Canadian porn stars that head south. The first I learned of it was during a telephone conversation in which she jumped from “My Sears points should cover the new stove” to “I was in a bit of a pickle with a porn star…but that part of my life is over”.

The story goes (but my sister and I have embellished it so much over the years that neither of us can remember how it starts…) Mom had billeting a sex worker of dubious nationality. When some gents in uniform dragged her off, she left behind her portfolio: face shots and not-face shots, videos, and magazine articles. The house guest had spread her creative talents across many mediums.

She was not unlike author Cox who went to New York aspiring to be a writer but made his name dropping his drawers for Americans. On his return to Canada, Cox took pen in hand and pumped out Shuck. Like my mom’s first porn star, Cox moved on.

Now my mom’s second porn star is another story. He belonged to someone she dearly loved and be default he found room in her heart.  Like Cox he dropped his drawers for Americans, but unlike Cox he had the good sense to pick the warmer clim of California.

As far as I know, that’s pretty much the limit of my mom’s collection of Canadian porn stars. But I still might encourage her to sign Shuck out from the library…she might recognize an old friend.

Catch the review of Shuck online at the Quill and Quire website.

It’s always fun to launch Canadian authors into the wild. Book crossing is an excellent way to share Canadian stories with Canadians but it is also a fun way to meet book crossers from around the world.   

I’ve just launch Jan Wong to Brazil. Brazilian author, teacher, and book crosser Onaldo A. Pereira is setting up a foreign language library in Brasilia, for needy readers. His team is looking for books in the following languages: English, French, Spanish and Italian and especially in: Catalan, Aragonés, Galego, Ladino, Română, Rumantsch, Sardu and Vèneto. 

Are you tripping over too many foreign language books at home? Contact Onaldo using his book crossing alias atash-caipira.

What could be more fun than sending Jan Wong out of the country?

Quill & Quire’s website summary of the 2009 Canada Reads picks is bang on. And the timing is perfect – we’ve all just slogged through CanLit Awards Season.

I wonder how the Canada Reads winner fits into literati circles.

And I ask you…is winning Canada Reads now the Stanley Cup for Canadian books?

“Milagros and Migdalia sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-ing…”

Who pray, are the arboreal lovers?

Milagros Gaines and Migdalia Moore are computer generated pseudonyms from the spam software that renders my WordPress “comment” in-box constipated.

Each day I get upwards to 70 false comments from fake readers suggesting “I like you blog. Mist investigate issues” and “7serg234usxxx593” and “jello, cats, liposuction” and the usual offers to reduce my mortgage and increase my penis size.

George Murray at Bookninja has taught me that if you include links in the comment box on a blog, it will set the anti-spam software off.

Here’s the thing, the random generator of spam names could be a lazy Canadian writer’s dream!

Need a name for that banker in chapter five, the guy with the dandruff who wipes his nose on his sleeve? How about Milagros Gaines?

What about the hunk at the coffee shop who gives your protagonist two shots of organic milk in her fair trade coffee and leaves his copy of Urban Recycler on the counter Tuesday morning just before ten when he knows she’ll walk in thirsty? Sound like a Milagros Gaines?

Milagros Gaines, also known as ‘Milo’ by his former piano teacher, could be sent off to kill the assassin with legs up to here. “You’ll know Migdalia when you see her,” his secret agent boss would say “Migdalia always wears a flower in her hair – a petunia.”

On behalf of all of my fellow lazy writers, I say bring on the false comments from fake readers. I can always use a Harris Hart somewhere.

My girlfriend Dee gave me eight boxes of pre-loved books for the Wakefield Book Crossing Zone.

As I dug through the boxes, I put little mounds of books aside: two books for me, one for the Zone, one for the library book sale, three for me, ohhh Dad will like that one, four for me, two for the Zone, …

My private reserve amounted to 32 books. I spent the next two evenings rearranging the piles.  My mound grew to 38.

“I thought books were for sharing.” My beau reminded me. My beau reminds me of this whenever I attempt to hoard tomes.

Books are for sharing. I tried to make Yost Levi convince Harry of this when they cleaned out Yost’s apartment in Dining with Death.

It’s a notion that my girlfriend Sandra Choquette told me more than a decade ago when, as I helped her move house,  I was aghast to discover that she had no books!

“Books are for sharing.” She had said that she only kept a book if she planned to reread it or give it to her kids.  Otherwise, she passed her books on to friends or donated them to the library. Sandra was a book crosser before book crossing was cool.

Sandra was a book crosser; she died last year on the day after Thanksgiving.

This morning I tried to dwindle down the mound of 38 titles, tried to slide some of the books over to the Book Crossing Zone pile.  I couldn’t.  

As long as the mountain of books stares me down I will have Sandra in my ear whispering “books are for sharing”. I don’t want to let them go. I don’t want to let her go.