Welcome to Litsy!

Happy Canada Day @KVanRead and all Canadian or Canadian-loving Littens! I‘ve always liked Canada. I don‘t blame you for electing a hot PM. 😜

1. Tagged. Love this book
2. Eden Robinson. Great writing, interesting native components, and when you hear her speak, she seems so cool and has the best laugh.
3. BeaverTails!

I shall tag Canadian Litten @BookishTrish

After around two and a half years, my #owlpost book has found its way back to me! I‘ve enjoyed reading everyone‘s comments and give my thanks to everyone who read it. I‘m usually not much for rereading, but I read this book around 15 years ago or so and look forward to reading it again sometime later this year.

I finished this book almost two weeks ago and I am glad that I waited to post a review. The strangest thing is that I was reading two books back to back about Newfoundland for two different book clubs! I learned quite a lot about this fascinating Canadian Province! This was a lengthy read,and being on a deadline, I couldn‘t fully appreciate the beautiful writing. Based on true facts with a strong woman added to make it interesting,I give it a 👍🏻

Trying to come up with a book for this challenge, when lo and behold, I read this line in my current read! “He has come to the conclusion that there is no way that he can throw a crippled woman with a broken wrist out of his bar that would not make him look #ridiculous.” Close as I could get to that image! 😉 #getmovin #letsgetridiculous

There was beauty everywhere, but it was the bleak beauty of sparsity, scarcity and stuntedness, with nothing left but what a thousand years ago had been the forest floor, a landscape clear-cut by nature that would never recover on its own.

My dear husband has a concert tonight, and I brought a book to read while the group rehearses.

I noticed after the train began to make its way across Cape Breton that every little thing looked different. I had expected differences, of course, but it had never occurred to me that absolutely nothing would be the same, that to some degree, the landscape would differ in every detail from the one back home.

I exhausted myself trying to take it all in. My notion of home and everything in it as ideal, archetypal, was being overthrown.

A relative of my father‘s had once written him from New York: “Dear Charlie: There are more people in my apartment building than there are in my hometown!” That optimistic exclamation point. The marvels of New York.

Sir Richard had been prime minister from 1919-1923 when 4 of his own cabinet ministers resigned in protest over his corruption-ridden record, to which he responded by resigning the prime ministership to sit as an independent. Shortly afterwards, 2 years after his knighthood, he was arrested for bribery, patronage, embezzlement of public funds & a host of other charges. [..] He was still on probation when he won back the Liberal leadership in 1927.

[1932] Newfoundland was one hundred million dollars in debt, much of it owing to the cost of fighting on the side of England in the First World War. The interest charges alone equalled half our annual revenue. Over 50% of the country‘s population was unemployed.

Enthralling novel about the rags-to-riches life of a real historical figure, Joey Smallwood, the first premier of Newfoundland. It‘s a hefty, mostly true, tale—maybe 100 pages too long at 526—but that‘s my only real complaint. Memorable characters, lots of rich detail and tongue-in-cheek humour. #canadianauthor #mountTBR

“For now we dips the bucket right into the well.” Since he was clearly not dipping a bucket, but was using a pump, I was mystified as to what he meant, not realizing until hours later that by “for now,” he meant “‘fore now” — before now, in the past. He had, as far as I could tell, no other way of referring to the past except by this phrase, which to me meant the present.

Observation made by the British diplomat Alleyne Fitzherbert: “When dealing with Canadians, it is advantageous to seem to be negotiating from a position of weakness, for when faced with an abject opponent, they become concession-happy and will accede to almost anything.”
[Wayne Johnston is revealing all our secrets in this novel. 😉]

He sighed wearily as if to say, “I‘ll wait while you give your high horse a token trot around the room.”

I thought of a documentary by Michael Dominic when I came across this passage about a New York flophouse: “all the rooms had been torn down and the space partitioned into cage-like rooms with chicken-wire that extended to the ceiling. The point of the cages, since they provided neither privacy nor quiet, was solely to protect the residents and their meagre possessions from each other.”

I saw standing alone against the iron fence a woman I knew would agree to be my wife if I asked her. It was presumptuousness at first sight.

“The pamphlet described in great detail a medical procedure that you called mental ventilation, that is, the drilling of holes in the skulls of the sick to let the evil spirits out.”

I wrote about this subject previously: https://lindypratch.blogspot.co.nz/2017/10/a-year-of-literary-trepanations.html?...

Will 2018 be another year of literary trepanations?

We had not been living there a week when there was an offshore storm with winds well above hurricane force. As I lay in bed, I felt the whole house shift in its foundation. I imagined it toppling end over end down the Brow and landing upright in the harbour, bobbing among the ships until someone climbed aboard and found us dead. When the gust subsided, the house would slowly right itself, creaking like a ship whose hull was rolling. [internet pic]

“He had curly, black, wildly unkempt hair that came down almost to his eyes, thick black eyebrows and burnsides that joined like a strap beneath his chin.”

I‘m not sure if ‘burnsides‘ is an archaic way of saying sideburns, or a Newfie way of saying it. 🤔

I think they were whelmed into self-absorption in part from being the agents of a slaughter of such magnitude, killing constantly from sun-up past sundown. This was not like fishing, which is what most of them did the rest of the working year, not a mass capture of insensible creatures from another element. The death of each seal was individual, the result of a single act committed by a single person at close quarters.......

The cod was spread out to the sky & whatever flew there including gulls & crows who, as if to spite the fishermen for salting the cod past what even their palates could endure, shat on it from great heights. You could not eat the cod anyway without soaking it for days in water & then boiling it for hours, after which it was still so salty that the least of the complaints that were brought against it was that once it had been smeared with birdshit.

Goats wandered about at will the way cats in cities do today. If they lingered long enough in one neighbourhood, they were designated “lost” and were “claimed” by someone. But it was a rare goat who would stand for being tethered, so they more or less remained common property. Everyone milked them. For children, to go out milking was not much different than to go out picking berries.
(Internet photo)

Just started The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and I‘m already loving the language. 7 pages in, 3 passages flagged. It‘s fitting that I‘m reading it in a hilly harbour city—Wellington—a setting not so different from St John‘s, Newfoundland.
“Every day it looked like that. And every day there were a thousand other such sights, a tedium of wonder that exhausted me.”
#mountTBRchallenge

Favourite book set in Newfoundland? Please share!

Saw the stage adaptation of this play at the National Arts Centre. It hit the highlights, although it had to lose Fielding's History of Newfoundland. Mobile, modular sets, rapid changes of costume, and an adorably tiny Joey Smallwood!

Funny and engaging

An engrossing book about the man who brought Newfoundland into Confederation and the woman whose reportage followed him every step of the way. Recommended if you like historical novels about Canada.

Learned a new word today: "enisled". Means to turn into an island, to place on an island, or to be isolated.

This hammocky book is perfect for a rainy Saturday morning.

Gotta go with Wayne Johnston for Fun Friday Photo! Such a beautiful rendering of Newfoundland. Happy Canada Day!