Top Ten Tuesday - Writer's I've Seen at MWF

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Book Events/Festivals I’d Love to Go to Someday (Real or Fictional) which was  submitted by Nandini @ Unputdownable Books)

Is it too much of a cop out to say all of them? It feels like it is!

I am very lucky to live in a city which was the second city in the world to be named as a UNESCO City of Literature and there are plenty of festivals or conferences around the city. The main one, the Melbourne Writers Festival, is announcing it's line up and format tomorrow! If the program had been released today then my Top Ten post would have been about that, but instead, it is out tomorrow, so instead I have decided to use my post this week to talk about some of the authors who I have heard speak in previous years.

I have been going to Melbourne Writers Festival for around 10 years now. Not only have I had the chance to listen to some great authors speak, but also I have been able to meet up with other book bloggers over the years. Some of the authors I have heard speak at MWF include:

Ann Patchett - I saw Ann Patchett back in 2011, where she was talking about her book State of Wonder. I did enjoy that book. I do still need to read her newest book The Dutch House too.

Sarah Dunant - I saw a couple of sessions with Sarah Dunant back in 2013 and both were fascinating. The first session was talking about Italian art and history, with a particular focus on Lucrezia Borgia. I got her book, Blood and Beauty, at that time. Still haven't read it!

Kate Grenville - I saw a session with Kim Scott and Rohan Wilson back in 2011 talking about the challenges of writing about the settlement of Australia, particularly in relation to native Australian portrayals. Kate Grenville has a new book out and looking at the current MWF website, I would suggest she is going to be a featured author again this year.

Kim Scott -After hearing Kim Scott speak in the same session as  Kate Grenville, I knew that I had to read his book That Deadman Dance, which I thought was excellent.

Kevin Kwan - Kevin Kwan was a speaker in 2013at as session which focussed on books as objects of beauty which was fascinating.

John Boyne - This session was memorable for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I could have listened to him talk for hours, but also because a friend of mine who lives in Sydney happened to walk in and sit down in front of me. I had no idea she was in Melbourne, and for her it was a impulsive decision to attend a session.

Melina Marchetta - This was one of the sessions I attended last year because I do love her books! And I would totally go and listen to her talk any time!

Justin Cronin - In 2016 I attended several MWF sessions, including Rainbow Rowell and David Leviathan, but for the purpose of this post I am going to mention seeing the author of the Passage trilogy.

Susan Johnson - I saw Australian author Susan Johnson speak back in 2013 at a session called Sex and Sensibility. You know that a session exploring sex and sensuality in literature is going to be fun, which it was!

Margo Lanagan - My final author for today's post is another Australian author, Margo Lanagan who I saw speak back in 2013.


Back in the day I was very diligent and wrote recaps of many of the sessions I attended which you can revisit through the links I have included above. The last couple of years I haven't written anything! Whoops! This year I will try to do better and do something between those two extremes.

Oh, and in answer to the actual question for this week, in addition to all the Australia capital city festivals (Perth, Adelaide, Sydney etc) I would like to visit the Ubud festival in Bali, Hay on Wye festival in the UK, and Book Expo America. Closer to home there is a small town in country Victoria called Clunes which has an annual weekend festival which I would like to visit one day.

Sunday Salon: Melbourne Writers Festival Part 3

Melbourne Writer's Festival has actually been over for a week but I haven't yet written up my last two sessions, so that is what I will be doing for today's Sunday Salon post! I actually have another author event to yesterday and had a fantastic day out, but that will have to wait for next week I guess.

You can read my first two MWF posts here and here.


Between the A Fine Romance session and my next session, Bree and I went off hunting for more Mali statues (I will put up a snapshot post of more of these in due course), then it was time for A Conversation with John Boyne!


While I own quite a few John Boyne books the only one I have actually read is The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. Before the session had even started it was one that I would remember fondly as I ran into someone I knew who lives in Sydney but had come down to Melbourne for a couple of days and had decided to attend a few MWF sessions while she was down here. It was a lovely surprise to run into her!

Like A Brief History of Montmaray (which I reviewed on Friday), The Boy in Striped Pyjamas has been  recently republished as a Vintage Classic which was quite an honour for Boyne.

The first question asked Boyne about where he started writing and he explained that he started writing contemporary fiction which really was about himself. There are a lot of Irish writers writing about contemporary Ireland and so he had to recognise his own strengths which include that he loves to research.

Boyne was asked about his book Mutiny on the Bounty, particularly because there is such a strong Australian connection to that story. He talked about how, prior to recent Hollywood portrayals, Captain Bligh had a pretty good reputation but the modern twist to the story seems to be that Christian Fletcher was the good guy which confused him.

The narrator in Mutiny is a young cabin boy. Boyne likes to have a narrator or main protagonist that is naive to the situation that they are coming to and in a way that takes the place of the reader and also puts them next to a person of authority.

He was asked about his use of young boys as main characters to which Boyne responded that there is something universal about boys who are 8 or 9. There is no interest in girls etc to take into consideration. It's a nice age.

Boyne was then asked about changing between writing for adults and for children. He admitted that it was not really part of the plan. Even Boy wasn't meant to be a children's book, but he did always feel as though teens could have read his adult books. He talked about the fact those terms, adult vs children etc, are often media or publisher terms. For example, a book like Treasure Island was written as a book, not as a crossover book! He doesn't really mind who is reading his books, whether they be adults reading his children's books or vice versa, just wants readers!

He did say that he felt that his naivety about the 'rules' or writing for children really helped his books. He likes to gradually reveal the plot and is conscious of not writing down to kids. He relies on the kids being intelligent readers and that they don't believe that the only thing that is important in books is vampires!

The discussion then moved onto The Absolutist which Boyne admits is a much darker book in direct contrast to the lighter nature of his previous book. This book was inspired by a demonstration by descendants of those soldiers who were absolutists or who were shot during WWI for deserting when they were shell shocked. He then realised that he had never read about conscientious objectors or gay soldiers.

In closing he mentioned that his favourite author is John Irving, that his new book is partially set in Australia so he came to live here for a few months while he was writing, that the parents in the new book are truly terrible. The audience asked him about writing Boy and he said he knew 3 things - that there was a boy being taken away from a place of safety, that the two boys would meet and the ending. He also touched on the movie adaptation during his talk.

To be honest, I could have listened to Boyne talk for hours longer! Not only because of the Irish accent, but also because there seemed to be so much of interest to talk about!

The final event on that day was the Twelve Planet Press event. Unfortunately my phone was nearly flat so no photos from this event. I have been a Twelve Planets books fan since the series started (you can see my reviews of the books here) and so it was great to have a chance to hear readings by the authors from the books I had already read, but also short readings from the upcoming books in the series that don't necessarily even have titles yet! Kerry Greenwood, author of the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman series was the special guest and it was fun to see her in person, and Jason Nahrung, author of the book Salvage that I own but still haven't read also read!

The whole event had a really fun vibe and it was great to see a few familiar faces in the crowded room.

Originally my plan was only to attend one day of the Festival, but I knew that I was a little disappointed that in restricting my attendance in that way I wouldn't get to see Susan Johnson speak. She wrote the book My Hundred Lovers which I read and enjoyed earlier this year as part of a readalong. In the end, I went with the one more session won't hurt so I was up early again last Saturday heading into the city for the Sex and Sensibility session which also featured Emily Maguire and Chris Flynn.

The host started talking about banned books in Australia which have tended to be banned due to explicit obscenities including sex. Whilst in contemporary genre fiction sex can be explicit and detailed that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case in literary fiction.

Each of the authors then read from their books. Johnson read the scene that I have previously shared as a Weekend Cooking post, and Emily Maguire well too, but Chris Flynn stole this section of the session for me because of his coyness about reading around the juicy bits but not the actual juicy bits. He got quite embarrassed about it, and explained that by saying that he didn't really feel as though it was something that was designed to be read in public to a large group of people, but rather that it was a contract between the author and the reader directly.

Each of the authors was asked about the origins of their books.

Susan Johnson talked about being interested in writing a story from the book out. The original idea was to just encompass the lovers but it was too difficult and so it was expanded to include all different levels of sensuousness. She originally had the idea for the book in 1997/98 but it was only once she went to see AS Byatt and Doris Lessing speak and they talked about how no one has written a female Casanova that it clicked for her.

Chris Flynn talked about how the sex was actually the first scenes that he wrote. He wrote 8 different drafts of the book in third person looking back but it wasn't working. There was one paragraph in that 8th draft that ended up being the seed for the entire 9th draft which became the book. He found the sex and the scenes about books the easiest to write. While the sex is still there, a lot of the book stuff was edited out although there is still a flavour of that there.

For Emily, her book started very differently to where it ended up. Emily had a moment of peace in Temple of Literature in Hanoi and that is when the character came to her. She did think about writing a book where the character found her own peace but realised that had been done before, so instead she takes a character who has already found her peace and then disturbs that peace.

The authors then moved on to talk about the power of sex which is still evident in the news headlines of today. Susan Johnson talked about sex being a powerful, instinctual force. There is still potential for sex to overthrow everything and it makes us uncomfortable (examples include Bill Clinton and Dominic Strauss-Kahn.)

Chris talked about the power of sex to heal his character. His main character had come from a very violent place and sex enabled the character to explore a very different side of himself.

The next question talked about the sense of place in the novels.

Chris talked about Thailand being known for sex tourism and being shocked by it when he was there.

Emily's book is set in Vietnam where there are sex tourists, but only for certain groups of people. For example, it is no good for a Western woman over 30 and so it was a very safe place for her character, Misha to be in, until the main male character turns up.

Susan talked about France being important as a setting because sensual life is very much integrated into life there, and it is classless. Chris jumped in here and agreed with this having spent a couple of years living there as a young Irishman.

The questions then moved onto the bad sex in fiction awards (about which a comment was made about the high profile names which appear on the list - almost a Booker shortlist!)

Emily Maguire talked about the fact that there is some confusion between writing about sex and erotica writing and that it is not by accident that this award came out of England.

The authors were then asked about whether there is a fear of tipping into pornography

Emily talked about writing in a way that is deeply empathetic, compassionate and human. She takes stuff that would be easy to laugh at or call freaks but then show the deepest need to be seen. With every sex scene, there needs to be a reason to be there, not just sex for sex sake. It is a way to get to the core of a person.

Susan talked about female authors writing to take apart the patriarchal notion of what pornography is.

The conversation then moved into a discussion of how readers often assume that the characters must be telling the author's personal stories. Emily talked about being sent explicit photos after her first book and being congratulated by readers for getting herself out of that terrible relationship (that she was never in but her character was). After several books people realise that she can't be all of those characters so she mustn't be any of them!

Chris had had people assume that his book must be a diary of his own time in Thailand and that the sex must be based in reality and had people make judgements to his face about that.

Susan talked about how she has quite a direct style but most of what is in the book is nowhere near personal. She is looking more for an authentic emotional truth rather than an actual truth!

We then moved onto audience questions. The first was about how much pressure there was from publishers to include sex scenes. Emily and Susan said there was none, but Chris talked about how he had shortened a scene and when the editor realised it they asked for that additional orgasm to be put back in.

The conversation moved on, almost inevitably, to Fifty Shades and there were several comments made (the term erotic nonsense may have been uttered). Susan Johnson talked about how sex sells, but the fact of the matter is that no publisher really knows what is going to make a bestseller until it has already happened. Emily also talked about the fact that there is lots of interesting stuff happening in fan fiction.

There was then a question about sexual freedoms and repression (at least that's what I think the question as about) which led to a discussion about how the Pill is one of the biggest achievements in humanity as for the first time in history it gave women control of their own reproduction. Whilst we can see immediate impacts we may be too close to be able to see long term impacts.

There is no taboos about what you can write about but rather sex is really important base to show characters and development.

Emily Maguire then talked about Jane Eyre being one of the hottest books but it is about the repression of the times. One of the difficulties in writing contemporary is that the characters don't have those restrictions.

Chris talked about how he notices if the real deal of life is absent from contemporary novels and he becomes suspicious of the reading experience. By the real deal he gave the examples of sex and also boredom.

The final question talked about the language used for sex and how to make it original. In other words how to avoid the cliches and the over the top euphemisms.

Chris talked about sometimes having to use euphemisms but it does depend on the character. His character in this book is very frank but whatever language is chosen it should be for shock value. He did try to temper the scenes by including humour.

Susan talked about it being difficult to write about sex well and it will be better if it comes up organically rather than trying really hard.

In closing Emily said that it has to come from the character. If you are trying to be pornographic or turn the read on it can be too cliched. It needs to be rotted that character's sense of what turns them on.

Overall, this was a fantastic session - it was fun, informative, great discussion! And it was a thrill to get to talk to the authors afterwards and to get my copy of One Hundred Lovers signed. I came out of the session wanting to read both Chris and Emily's books!

Bring on the next Melbourne Writers Festival!

After this session, Bree and I walked for what felt like hours finding yet more Malis!


Just Finished

Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan and Strong and Sexy by Jill Shalvis.

Currently reading

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, Mr Chen's Emporium by Deborah O'Brien and The Lady Slipper by Deborah Swift

Next up

The Winter Mantle by Elizabeth Chadwick and The Gilded Lily by Deborah Swift

Welcome to Paris In July

This month I am going to be participating in Paris In July - a month long blogging extravaganza that focuses on all things Parisian and French! Paris in July is being hosted by Karen from Bookbath and Tamara from Thyme for Tea and you can still sign up to join in on all the fun.

I expect that I will have three or four posts all up, but there could be more.

For my first post I am sharing a quote from Susan Johnson's book My Hundred Lovers. There were actually numerous posts which talked about the main character's love of Paris (in this passage she calls herself the Suspicious Wanderer) but I had to pick just one! The quote comes from pages 100-101

That summer in Paris began in one single, gleaming day. One evening the Suspicious Wanderer went to bed with the sky starless, unseen clouds dense with rain. In the morning she opened the shutters to a glittering new word. Sunlight polished windows and rinsed the streets, shutters and doors and windows were open everywhere, flowers had boomed overnight. She thought she heard laughter.

She look down at herself, dressed in one of Nasser's oversized T-shirts, shrugged, then grabbed her bag and house keys. 'Paris, here I come," she said, running down the circular stairs two, three at a time. The old stairs with their narrow wooden steps and thin, curved wooden handrails never failed to lift her heart and they lifted it now, high, high, higher.

On the street everyone looked happy. It was already hot, and she wasn't wearing anything beneath her T-shirt. The cotton rubbed satisfactorily against her high pink-tipped breasts, still unsuckled. She strode purposefully down Avenue du Maine, past Metro Alesia, past the beautiful creamy stone church on the corner, past scooters and markets and old ladies with shopping baskets and students with cigarettes and scarves.

'I will stop at the first cafe I like the look of,' she said to herself, and by this she meant one that faced exactly the right way into the sun, with a table and chair situated exactly in the position she wished it. It drove Steph and Nasser mad, her insistence on choosing exactly the right cafe, with exactly the right chair at the right table.

'Just bloody sit down, will you?' Steph was likely to say.

'S'il te plait, Madame Marie-Antoinette,' said Nasser.

But now she was alone. She saw a cafe up ahead, one facing the right way into the sun. She sat down. Immediately a waiter, wearing the obligatory whie Parisian waiter's apron, came up. 'Mademoiselle?' She ordered and sat back, happy.

Readalong Week 3: My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

This week is the final week of the My Hundred Lovers readalong which was being hosted by Bree at All the Books I Can Read.

This is a book that I probably would not have picked out by myself to read but I am glad that I read it. I enjoyed it so much that I already have my next Susan Johnson book waiting to be picked up at the library.

Whilst the author may have set out to deliberately shock and surprise people with some of the things that she talked about in this book, ultimately I found myself having to think, which isn't always a bad thing.

There were whole sections in this book that I could quote as the writing was just bursting with life. There were also sections that had me cringing in my seat and having to read again because I wasn't sure that I had really just read what I thought I read! As I mentioned in last week's post I had to take to dog-earring the page as I didn't have enough book marks with me to keep on marking the passages that I found beautiful or moving or compelling in some way. This book definitely has the distinction of being the most dog-earred book in my library!

As a central character, Deb was compelling and confusing to the reader, searching and confused as a character but ultimately I was surprised at how well I was able to relate to many of the emotions that she allowed to play out through her actions and reactions during the book..

The book is written in short, sometimes very short, chapters that chop and change from each of Deborah's love and they aren't necessarily chronologically ordered. Some are lovers in the amorous sense of the word but other chapters talk about the feeling of the sun on your skin, or crisp, clean sheets on a bed, gelati on a hot day and so much more.

One of the questions that Bree asked in her wrap up post was:

Do you feel you were given a whole picture of Deborah, her life and her lovers? Or do you feel there were things missing, things you would’ve liked elaborated?

I don't think we were necessarily given the whole picture of Deborah because that would imply more of the day to day life than most of us would have wanted to read. What we were given were glimpses into the life of a woman, from her own perspective, about the things that were important to her. I think she was honest with us about many of the incidents in her life and the impacts (for example, how she met Celestine, who became her lover, in a doctor's clinic where she was being tested for AIDS), or at least as honest as she could be.

Many of the relationships were, however, very filtered. For example, we knew that right from childhood there was a lot of jealousy in regards to Deborah's relationship with her sister, and that continued right to the end, and deservedly so, but there was just one chapter where the two sisters shared a tender moment and I think the same can be said of her father - just the one tender moment for her to grasp onto. There were a few details about her son but not a lot. I particularly loved the chapter titled Breast where she talked about looking down on her newborn son as he breastfed. I remember that feeling of wonderment so clearly which is kind of hard to believe as I look at my 13 year old son who is now taller than I am.

I was glad that by the end of the book, Deborah appeared to have found a place where she could be content. Ultimately, I suspect that is what we all want.

This is a book that I can see myself perhaps rereading and savouring again in a few years time!

Thanks to Bree for hosting the readalong and to Allen and Unwin for the providing a copy of the book for the readalong.

Rating 4.5/5

Synopsis

A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on one hundred moments from a lifetime's sensual adventures. After the love, hatred and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self.

By turns humorous, sharp, haunting and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel from one of Australia's premier writers.

Lyrical and exquisite, My Hundred Lovers captures the sheer wonder of life, desire and love

This book counts for both the Aussie Author Challenge and for the Australian Women Writer's Challenge.

Readalong Week 2: My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

I'm late....again!

Actually, I decided to not post this second post earlier because I already posted a quote from the book on Saturday as part of my Weekend Cooking post and so I didn't want to post again so close together.

Please note that there may be some spoilers following.

I found so many aspects of this second section book so interesting without necessarily liking our main character, Deborah, any more than I did previously.

To me, Deborah is a woman with many flaws. She is looking for her sense of worthiness in any way she can whether it be men, or other experiences. She doesn't recognise the difference between sex and love and I think that is a pattern of behaviour that many people would recognise.

As readers, we are only given just enough information about certain aspects of Deborah's life but then a LOT of information about other aspects. For example, we don't know very much about Deborah's relationship with her husband and yet we are 'treated' to chapters like the three man day and a couple of the sexual experiences that had me squirming uncomfortably thinking too much information!

In her discussion post this week, Bree has touched on a number of the important issues including why a woman would stay with a man like the shadow lover despite how unhappy she was, about the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, various relationships and more.

A couple of things that I wanted to touch on was the addictive personality of Deborah. At one stage, she talks about staying away from heroin because "she adored the way heroin made her feel, and how far from fear it carried her. But she was worried that she loved it too much, and never used it again." I totally related to this sentiment. My father is a recovering alcoholic and so I have always been aware of the power of addiction and the way it destroys the lives of both the addicted person and their family. When I was young and silly, I was absolutely aware of the danger of trying drugs just in case I really liked it. I am fine with having a drink but anything more than that would still scare me a little bit. I was very surprised when I had a conversation with my father about exactly that sentiment and he was actually quite mortified that that was my thought process. I am not precisely sure why to this day! Besides, it turns out that my addiction of choice is food and I am not really achieving much in dealing with that issue.

Without going to the extremes that Deborah does, I can definitely relate to her in so many ways. I loved the sections about her travel to France (where she started calling herself the Suspicious Wanderer). In a way, I think that by wanting to escape to France she is both trying to run away from herself with the hope that she would actually find a different version of herself. When I went overseas to live, in many ways I think I was hoping to find a better version of myself, but in the end what I did find was that no matter how far you travel, where you go, the one thing that you actually take with you is yourself.  When asked where are her roots:

She thought for a moment. She loved Australia but she also loved France. She wondered if she might be like a plant whose roots do not travel down but sideways.

As much as I find Deborah relatable, and sometimes that is quite uncomfortable, the thing that is really making this book a good read is the quality of the writing.

As I read, I always keep an eye out for quotes to use in future posts, whether it be food related like the one I posted on Saturday, or perhaps about Christmas for later in the year, or for the upcoming Paris in July event. The author has the words leaping off the page in such an attention catching way so regularly I ran out of random bits of paper to use as bookmarks and had to start turning down the page corners.   *gasp*

I am really looking forward to finishing the book to see where the author is leading us with this narrative. I suspect that there may be shocks towards the end of the book.

Weekend Cooking: Cheese-Chocolate-Croissants

My Weekend Cooking post this week is from the book My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson. I read the chapter that this quote comes from, and then when I finished it, I went back and read it again, wishing that I had a fresh croissant there waiting for me to savour when I got to the end of the chapter!

The quote comes from page 26-29:

My mouth is the opening into myself, the principal portal of the body: the teeth, the gums, the fleshy slope of the throat, the glistening entrance into the dark depths below. The myriad tastebuds of the tongue, which when I was young, I imagined resembled the buds on the frangipani tree outside our house.

I pictured a tongueful of flowers, smaller than the eye could see, hundreds of tender buds opening as one to savour the body's bountiful catch.


From my earliest days I have had affairs with the food that gives my body life. Food may be mouthless but it is nonetheless animate, created by the dance of water, heat and life.

I have had endless affairs with fat French cheeses, creamy and sticky, made from raw cow's milk, brought to full, ripe life through the confluence of time and air. The rich distinctive smell of a mature brie de Melun has spilt into my nose and mouth, causing my mouth to flood with water and desire.

I have been a lover of milky chocolate dissolving on my tongue, of the dreamy bloom of thick, sensuous fragrance that spreads up from the tongue to the roof of the mouth, to light up all the pleasure receptors of the brain.

And then there is the croissant. Such a brief, perishing object! So full of life, yet as evanescent as the most fragile butterfly, dead by day's end, its flowering over within hours. Le feuilletage, layer upon layer of pastry animated by yeast, alive with butter, rolled and folded as carefully as an old-fashioned handwritten letter.

In the northern hemisphere croissants have a season, like asparagus or cherries, and the croissant's season is brief, from the end of October to the beginning of November. After this, the wheat harvests of summer are blended with older harvests, and the pastry made from blended wheat becomes inferior.

The particular warm, satisfying fragrance of a proper croissant au beurre in season, preferably eaten at a cafe in Paris on a pale autumn day, fresh out of the oven, warm and alive.

The whiff of the egg wash in the moment before the croissant enters the mouth and is felt upon the tongue. The crisp golden flakes surrounding its moist heart, flakes as sharp as toast, which crackle as you bite into it. Pierre Herme, the renowned Parisian patissier, says that the sign of a good croissant is that you should be able to hear its suffering as you eat it.


The tongue is the last to forget desire: my mother's tongue loved chocolate, avocado and cream right up until the end, when at last her tongue of flowers forgot the sound of suffering.

This book has a lot of emphasis of the experiences of the senses and this description definitely had me salivating.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. For more information, see the welcome post.  

Readalong Week 1: My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

Over the next few weeks I am participating in a readalong of My Hundred Lovers by Australian author Susan Johnson. The readalong is hosted by Bree from All the Books I Can Read. My first order of business is to apologise to Bree for being so late with my post, but I have been busy with all sorts of other bookish goodness! This week's post covers pages 1-88 and I have to warn....


SPOILERS AHOY!


If you look at the title of this book you do have possibly have a fair idea of what to expect from this book, and the book blurb would also reiterate that:

A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on one hundred moments from a lifetime's sensual adventures. After the love, hatred and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self. By turns humorous, sharp, haunting and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel from one of Australia's premier writers.

Lyrical and exquisite, My Hundred Lovers captures the sheer wonder of life, desire and love.

It is at times shocking, at other times funny, but it is also surprising. I was expecting this to be an exposition of our main character Deborah's sex life and it is indeed that, but it is also more than that with observations about many sensory adventures including passages about food, observations about aging, about unhappy childhoods, about depression and unhealthy relationships and so much more.

The writing is often a treat for the senses. There is a section that I will be sharing later in the week that just had me wishing that I had a trip to Paris planned sooner rather than later. Then again, it doesn't take that much to get me to that point really.

The structure of the novel is interesting. The chapters are for the most part short and jump around from topic to topic, and with the narrative jumping forwards and backwards in time and from first person narrative to third person. It makes the reader work more than you would have to with a straight narrative but I think that the short chapters make that easier than it would if you had more substantial chapters.

Bree gave us some suggestion points to discuss and so I thought I would address those

How do you feel about Deborah? Do you like her? Can you relate to her? Did you feel sympathy for her? If so, why and if not, why?

At this stage I am not sure that we are meant to really like Deborah. So far, we have been given glimpses of the events in her life that coloured her impressions of herself and how she came to be the woman that she is now, but I am not convinced that we have seen too much of the real Deborah just yet. It will be very interesting to see how she treats many of the milestone moments in life in the rest of the book. For example, she just kind of glossed over the fact that she has at least one child which for most mothers would be a pretty major event!

I do think it is very telling though that for much of this section Deborah is referred to as 'the girl' rather than by her name, almost as if the fact that she is a girl is the complete definition of her as an entity and that the Deborah-ness of the entity is an after thought. This idea of 'the girl' also manages to keep the reader at arm's length for quite a bit of this opening of the book so it will be interested to see if this technique continues.

I do relate to Deborah though in particular in relation to her relationship with her family. Having grown up in a difficult family relationship I can see why she made many of the choices she made, particularly when it comes to sex and to the relationships that she chose to pursue. The search for love can be very problematic if you never learnt how to do that properly within the family environment, and to be honest, I feel that is very much reflected in my own life right now.

She is much more overtly sexual, particularly from a very young age and I must admit that in some ways I found that quite confronting because I don't remember being that way as a young girl myself, although I would have classified my teenage activity as relatively normal - at least I think so.

Do you think that her upbringing and her parents’ fractured relationship sent Deborah on a path of looking for acceptance and love, often in the most unlikely and unfortunate places? Does she use sex as a way to find or feel love?

Without any question of doubt. In my experience, there are two ways that people who have had traumatic childhood experiences will react to those events when it comes to their sexualness (if there is such a word. I didn't want to use sexuality in case it indicated sexual orientation whereas I am talking more about activity). One is that they will be very restrictive in relation to their relationships and the opposite can also be true where  the person concerned will look for 'love' wherever they can find it and will easily accept sex as a substitute for love.

Then again, some people are just more adventurous than others, and it could well be dependent of which activities they have been introduced into over the years. Deborah could well just be one of the more  naturally adventurous, and perhaps this is also reflected in other aspects of her life including the travel she has done for example.

As an aside, it seems that often these readalong books are trigger's for me to think about my past a lot. It happened with Foal's Bread which was very uncomfortable for me and is happening again with this book!

It turns out I had quite a lot to say about this section. We will see what happens in the next section!