Reading Matters

A visit to the John Rylands Library, Manchester

The historic reading room at the John Rylands Library (left) and one of the (wifi-enabled) reading alcoves. Both photographs are by Mike Peel and reproduced from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons Licence.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to go on a day trip to Manchester, 160 miles north-east of London, to visit my buddy and fellow book obsessive, Simon from Savidge Reads.

I've wanted to visit Manchester for years. God knows I used to write enough stories about its regeneration and building projects when I was a senior reporter on this magazine in the late 1990s! But when I stepped off the train I was more interested in catching up with my friend and having what amounted to a seven-hour long natter, rather than a tour of the sites.

And yet Simon, ever the generous host, walked me around the city and showed me the amazing architecture -- the grand sandstone buildings from the industrial revolution rubbing alongside 21st century temples of glass and steel -- all the while talking books and blogging and all the developments in each others' lives since we last saw each other in early November.

One of the day's highlights was a quick visit to the John Rylands Library, which is part of the University of Manchester, but open to the public and is free of charge. It's probably one of the grandest libraries I've ever had the privilege of wandering through, and it's beauty and sheer "wow factor" rivals even the Long Room in Trinity College, Dublin.

It's set across five floors, but the key floors to visit are the first, where a range of exhibitions are held, and the third, which features the oh-so beautiful historic reading room (see photographs above).

The collections are historically important and include some notable tomes such as the Gutenberg Bible as well as personal papers from the likes of Elizabeth Gaskell. When we visited I was delighted to see a 1922 hardcover edition of James Joyce's Ulysses on display.

The 1922 Egoist Press edition of Ulysses on display at the John Rylands Library. The photograph is by Paul Hermans and reproduced from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons Licence.

Regardless of the books inside, the building, and its interior architectural details, are worthy of a visit. Its built in the Victorian Gothic style, probably my favourite architectural era, and was constructed as a memorial to John Rylands, a wealthy textile baron, by his wife, Enriqueta, after his death. It's an extraordinary monument, and from the outside I had mistaken it for a church, because of its stained glass windows and tower. If Mrs Ryland wanted the building to resemble a temple to reading then I think she achieved it.

Thank-you to Simon for showing me what must be one of Manchester's best kept literary secrets!

If you want to visit the library yourself it is located at 150 Deansgate, Manchester M3 3EH. Tel: 0161 306 0555. For more information visit the official website.

'The Rider' by Tim Krabbé

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 148 pages; 2002. Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.

I am a keen cyclist, of the leisure and commuting variety, and regularly blog about my exploits at London Cycling Diary. But writing about cycling -- what it's like to be on the back of a bike, how it makes you feel and what you experience along the way -- isn't always easy. Which is why I was intrigued by a book billed as "the best evocation of a cycle race ever written". Of course, it may be the only novel ever written about a cycle race, but that's beside the point...

Tim Krabbé is a Dutch journalist and author, probably best known for his 1984 novel-turned-film The Vanishing. But he's also an accomplished chess player and a road cyclist. The Rider, first published in 1978, has developed a bit of a cult following among cycling aficionados. It's easy to see why. It's an astonishingly well written fictional account of what it is like to push yourself to the physical limit all in the name of cycle sport.

Despite the fact I'm not a road cyclist, nor particularly interested in the sport beyond watching highlights of The Tour Down Under or the Tour de France, I found it a completely absorbing read, one that can easily be consumed in a couple of hours. But be warned: it will leave you feeling almost as breathless as the cyclist whose every turn of the pedals we follow across 137 kilometres of punishing terrain.

The story is set on June 26, 1977 in which Tim Krabbé (yes, he uses his real name) competes in his 309th road race, the legendary Tour de Mont Aigoual in France. Despite coming to the sport late (he was 29), Krabbé has not wasted any time in getting himself into the European big league, competing against elite athletes who live to cycle and cycle to live.

The Rider has no chapter breaks but Krabbé uses kilometre markers (or milestones) to break up his text. For instance:

Kilometer 75-78. The fields are a dry yellow and light green. Endless fences lean crookedly across the landscape. To keep something out of the wind? Uphill or down, you can't sort it out, it drives you crazy. We shift, we stand on the pedals when we get too lazy to shift again. The sky up ahead is black. No one is watching us. More than two hours to go.

These bite-sized chunks not only describe the scenery Krabbé flies past on his bicycle, but explain what Krabbé is thinking -- or not thinking -- about at the time. ("On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets", he writes, because cycling in a competitive manner means you only live in the moment: there is no room to think about anything else.)

But sure enough Krabbé's thoughts turn to how he got into cycling, his training regime, past races and race tactics (being a "wheel sucker" is not one of them). Interestingly, this was a time of limited technology -- no bike computers or GPS systems here -- so some of what Krabbé writes about is dated (the fact he has to use a stopwatch propped up on a windowsill to measure his lap times is but one example), but it doesn't take away from the beauty of Krabbé's story.

But what I loved about this novel is Krabbé's ability to so perfectly describe that feeling of sheer delight when you are on a saddle and turning the pedals, of how wonderful it feels when you find the right cadence and everything hums along in perfect unison. And while there's no doubt that much of what he writes about is very intense -- the feeling, especially, of watching other cyclists whizz by, leaving you in their wake, and how difficult it is to keep turning the pedals when you haven't found your "cycling legs" -- he captures the camaraderie between cyclists very well and uses black humour to make light of the life and death situations confronted on the road.

Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilization. When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what's your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing, you kick him to death.

If you've ever wanted to know what it's like to be stuck in a peloton, or climbing ever so slowly up a massive mountain, or leading the sprint on a bike, then The Rider will let you experience it. And the best bit? Your heart will race, but you won't even have to crack a sweat.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Reactions to Reading

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers and other bookish bods to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles and new bloggers.

Today's guest is Bernadette from Reactions to Reading.

Bernadette is based in Adelaide, Australia, and her blog is a fascinating and eclectic mix of reviews, in particular crime fiction, but also historical fiction and memoirs, as well as posts about issues affecting readers in Australia, such as the high cost of books and geographical copyright restriction.

Without further ado, here's Bernadette's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

 

A favourite book: The Source by James A. Michener

I first read this book while travelling in the land in which it is set, which is undoubtedly part of the reason I fell in love with it. But it's not the whole reason. I love its scope, its drama, its epic feel and the way it tells one of history's biggest stories on a very human scale.

It is the tale of an area of land, known as a Tell, in what is now Israel from Stone Age times to the birth of modern Israel in 1948. Each chapter re-visits the Tell at various points in history, where the land basically stays the same but the humans using it change quite dramatically over several thousand years. The book has archaeologists and parallel time frames and multiple religions and just about everything else I have ever wanted in one long, delicious package.

A book that changed my world: Schindler's Ark (published in the US as Schindler's List) by Thomas Keneally 

Having just read quite a lot of Holocaust-related books for my last year at high school I remember being uninspired to read this book when I stumbled across it in a second-hand shop in the summer of 1984/85. But Keneally is one of my favourite Australian authors, so I took it home.

It is the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party, who risked his business and his life to save 1,200 Jews during WWII. The book isn't melodramatic and it doesn't paint a picture of a perfect hero in Schindler, which is why I love it.

The reason it changed my world is that I am, by nature, a pessimist and therefore inclined to think most things that need doing aren't worth starting because something will invariably go wrong. What I learned from the book was that even though things probably will go wrong (Schindler died many years after the war as a pauper and considered a traitor to his country) things that need doing should be started even if it takes your last breath. And I learned that even a womanising alcoholic like Schindler can change the world, or at some people's version of it. Not bad lessons to learn at 17.

 

A book that deserves a wider audience: Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures) by Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thomson

This is a memoir by three people -- a social worker, lawyer and doctor -- who worked for the United Nations during the 1990s and early 2000s. Though each has a section of the book to themselves, they do meet and work together at various points, so there is some crossover. Between them the three have seen some of the modern world's most horrific events in places like Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Rwanda and the book is a very down-to-earth look at what works, and what doesn't, where the UN is concerned.

I only heard about the book because Kofi Annan, who was UN Secretary-General when it was published, called for it to be banned. I don't blame him as he would (or should) have been ashamed of what people would learn about his organisation from reading it. If I could demand a single book be read by every politician on the planet it would be this one. It made me laugh, it made me cry and it gave me a glimpse into things that should never happen again, but probably will.

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Thanks, Bernadette, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday!

What do you think of Bernadette's choices? Have you read any of these books? I've not read any Michener, but I know my dad was a big fan. I read Schindler's Ark shortly before the Spielberg movie was released and found it a fascinating, slightly disturbing, but ultimately uplifting read. It was also incredibly detailed -- more so than the movie. Finally, the Emergency Sex book sounds like it would be just my cup of tea, I do love a good exposé!

'The Man from Beijing' by Henning Mankell

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 560 pages; 2011. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Despite liking Nordic crime novels, I've never quite got around to reading anything by Henning Mankell, arguably the grand master of the genre. I've been reluctant to read his Inspector Wallander mysteries because there are 11 books in the series, a major commitment for someone like me who would want to read them all in the correct order.

But The Man From Beijing is a stand-alone book, so there was no need to worry about over-committing myself. As it turns out, it was an entertaining read, and one that was not terribly demanding, but I'm not sure that it's encouraged me to go down the Wallander route -- although I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise.

The story starts off with a real show-stopper: nineteen people, all related, are slaughtered in a sleepy Swedish village in the dead of winter. It is Sweden's biggest mass murder. The media are crawling all over it, but the police don't have a clue as to who might have committed it. Was it a lunatic gone mad with a machete? Or a thoroughly planned exercise by a team of killers? What, exactly, was the motive?

But The Man From Beijing is not a police procedural. The story is told largely through the eyes of Birgitta Roslin, a perfectly nice middle-aged judge from Helsingborg, who is distantly related to a couple of the victims. In her working life Birgitta has seen and done it all (her experiences, related as back story, serve to highlight the dark underbelly of Swedish society). When she is signed off work with high blood pressure, she decides to fill her days investigating the mass murder -- as you do.

She has a few run-ins with the detective in charge of the investigation -- a bullish woman by the name of Vivi Sundberg -- but on the whole it's clear that Birgitta is miles ahead of the police in terms of finding leads and potential suspects. But how can she connect the red ribbon found at the scene with a nineteenth century diary? And who was the mysterious Chinese man who booked into a local hotel the night before the murder?

Just as Birgitta's investigation begins to really take off, Mankell does something unexpected. He takes the story back to 1863, at a time when three Chinese brothers were press-ganged into working on the railroad that links the American east coast with the west. What does this have to do with the murder in Sweden more than a century later? Ah, that would be telling, wouldn't it?

I think the major problem I had with this book was its structure. It morphs into a kind of political thriller, and the event which opens the book in such stunning style gets almost forgotten as Mankell builds up an extensive web of corruption across three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa. 

As you might expect from the title, a large chunk of the book is set in China. In fact, Birgitta, who wanted to join the Red Guard in her youth, visits the country on a spur-of-the-moment decision to continue her unofficial enquiries (the fact there is no mention of acquiring a travel visa was just one of many factual omissions that annoyed me while reading this book).

The China depicted here is modern and vibrant, but it is also deeply divided. Just as Mankell makes undisguised commentary about Sweden's social problems through the criminal cases over which Birgitta must preside, in the Chinese parts of the novel he makes more undisguised commentary about a rampant economic system, Communism and corruption. Indeed, he ties them all together, and then throws in a semi-plausible plot about China wanting to "export" its poverty-stricken peasants to Zimbabwe and Mozambique in exchange for helping to develop those countries. (I rather suspect Mankell read Mark Leonard's What Does China Think? as part of his research, because he regurgitates a lot of the facts that Leonard presents in his book, including the notion that China donates huge sums of money to African nations that have been turned down for loans by the International Monetary Fund.)

As a thriller, the story has a sufficiently menacing undertone to make one keep turning the pages. But as a crime novel it lacks punch, probably because the killer is clearly identified very early on in the book. Mankell then spends some 300-plus pages explaining how that killer came to do what he did.

On the whole, I enjoyed The Man From Beijing as a "holiday read" (I was travelling around Ireland at the time), but it's a woolly book in need of some tight editing. It is easily 200 pages too long. Still, the saving grace is Birgitta, a convincing character with just the right touch of paranoia, to keep the story pedalling along.

'The Riders' by Tim Winton

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 377 pages; 2008.

Tim Winton is easily one of Australia's most successful writers and yet I've only read one of his novels: the award-winning Cloud Street, which is pretty much compulsory reading if you are Australian. But earlier this month, having just joined my local library, I stumbled upon The Riders and decided to borrow it for a read. I did not expect to like it very much.

Boy, was I wrong. I bloody well couldn't put this one down. I ate it up in a matter of days, and when I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about it. And now that I've long finished it -- about a month ago now -- I'm still thinking about it and wondering about the characters and trying to figure out why they made the decisions they made and whether any of them genuinely knew what they were doing. The lives of Fred Scully, his wife Jennifer and their daughter Billie will be forever etched in my memory.

The story is set in the late 1980s. The time period is important, because this was the era before mobile phone technology, before the internet, before cheap overseas landline calls. This was the time in which moving to the other side of the world had huge implications because communications were so difficult, complicated -- and slow. Indeed, for much of this novel, the prime method of communication is the telegram: a succinct typewritten note delivered by hand.

The Scully's are somewhat typical young Australians in that they have done the "compulsory" overseas stint, living and working in London, Paris and Greece. But a long weekend to Ireland, to fill in a few days before their final return home to Perth, changes their lives in unimaginable ways. Jennifer falls in love with a dilapidated 18th century peasant's cottage (or "bothy") in County Offaly and they pretty much buy it on the spot. The idea is that Fred, a kind of Jack of all trades who's funded their travels by working on building sites and the like, will stay behind and make the cottage habitable. Meanwhile Jennifer, who is pregnant, will take Billie back home to Australia, pack up their belongings and sell the family home.

This is all back story, because when the novel opens, Fred (everyone, including his daughter, calls him Scully) is holed up in Ireland, doing the hard graft. Some 12 weeks into the project he gets word, via telegram, that Jennifer has sold the house and will be arriving in Shannon Airport on December 13. The excitement of her imminent arrival is palpable.

But on the day of their much awaited reunion only Billie steps off the plane. Jennifer is nowhere to be seen. There is no note and Billie, who is just a child, is mute, so traumatised by the situation that she refuses to speak.

Scully put the bucket of chips and the orange juice in front of his daughter and tried to think calmly. She'd said not a word since arriving and it compounded his anxiety. They sat across the white laminex table from one another, and to strangers they looked equally pasty and stunned. Billie ate her chips without expression.
"Can you tell me?"
Billie looked at the buffet bar, the procession of travellers with red plastic trays in hand.
"Billie, I've got a big problem. I don't know what's happening. I expected two people and only one came."
Billie chewed, her eyes meeting his for a moment before she looked down at her juice.
"Did Mum get hurt or sick or something at the airport in London?"
Billie chewed. [...]
"Was she on the plane with you from Perth? She must have been. She had to be. Billie, you gotta help me. Can you help me?"
Scully looked at her and knew whatever it was, it wasn't small, not when you saw the terrible stillness of her face. She was a chatterbox, you couldn't shut her up usually, and she could handle a small hitch, ride out a bit of complication with some showy bravery, but this.

This is the start of an amazing, sometimes terrifying and quite thrilling (for the reader) adventure, in which Scully drags Billie across Europe looking for his missing wife. And, as he does so, retracing the family's steps though Greece, France and, later, Amsterdam, he goes through every emotion in the book -- rage, heartache, misery, depression -- all the while trying to keep things in check for Billie's sake.

But the hardest part for Scully is coming to terms with the fact that Jennifer may not be the woman he thought she was. While he knows that he has married above his station -- he's a "working-class boofhead" after all, and she's a university-educated bureaucrat -- he begins to wonder if he's been well and truly duped.

There's a lot to like about this novel, but I particularly appreciated the strength of the father-daughter relationship and the unconditional love between Scully and Billie. And how nice to read about a father who takes his parental responsibilities seriously, when so many modern novels feature absent, abusive or incapable fathers.

Winton's prose is also hugely evocative. He is especially good at describing places, such as the streets of Paris or the landscapes of rural Ireland -- and on more than one occasion I couldn't help but think the book would make a wonderful movie, because the narrative is so filmic.

Of course the narrative pacing, and Scully's rising panic and poor decision-making, makes The Riders a real page turner. The whole time I had my heart in my throat, my pulse racing as I itched to discover what really happened to Jennifer and whether Scully would ever track her down. Without giving away the ending, let me say it wasn't what I expected -- and I'm still thinking about it weeks afterwards.

The Riders, which was first published in 1994, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995.

DublinSwell 2011: Sebastian Barry puts on a theatrical performance and leaves the audience wanting more

It's funny how the writer in person rarely marries with the notion of the writer you've created in your head.

I've been a long-time admirer of Sebastian Barry, having read all of his novels bar one (which I'm saving up), and I had envisaged a quietly spoken, shy retiring type. But in person, or at least on stage at DublinSwell last Friday night, he was larger than life, with a big booming voice and a confident swagger.

Of course, Barry is also a playwright, and I imagine he's trod the boards a few times, either in the process of writing his plays or helping to stage them, so performing his work in front of an audience, whether real or imaginary, probably comes quite naturally. I found that I couldn't take my eyes off him, and the voice, well, the voice boomed across the auditorium and held everyone in its sway.

Barry chose to read an excerpt from his 2005 Booker shortlisted novel A Long Long Way, an extraordinary tale about a young Irish soldier caught between two wars -- the Great War and the Irish War of Independence. It is heart-breaking in places, one of those stories that leaves an indelible print on the memory.

Hearing it being read out loud was an astonishing experience. Barry chose the scene in which the young Willie Dunne returns from the battlefields of Belgium, still covered in mud, grime and lice from the trenches, and presents himself to his father, a much-respected member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, based in Dublin Castle. His father is a strong, proud man, not prone to shows of emotion.

In the scene he shoos Willie's younger sister away, and proceeds to bath his son, dousing him in hot water and scrubbing away the evidence of war. It is one of those quintessential scenes, that is tender without being sentimental, emotionally moving without being mawkish.

Barry reads it in a loud, strong baritone. He does the voices of the characters, even when there is no dialogue, so you get the full effect of who is thinking what, in particular the father, who is grappling with the realisation that his son has gone to war and experienced unimaginable things he will never truly know about.

It concludes with father and son gently embracing, but in that one embrace there is more than words can say, and Barry leaves it there, abruptly, while the audience, 2,000-strong, gives an audible groan of disappointment, as if to say, don't go, keep reading, we're listening and we want to know what happens next...

My reviews of Sebastian Barry's novels can be viewed on my Sebastian Barry page.

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

How I got to lead a literary-themed St Patrick's Day parade (now with update)

 
 
This time last week I had the great privilege of taking part in the St Patrick's Day parade through the streets of Dublin.

Now, if there's one place in the world where people know how to celebrate Paddy's Day it is Ireland's capital city. While the notion of a parade was actually invented by the Americans (the first recorded St. Patrick's Day parade was held on March 18, 1737 in Boston, the first one on Irish soil was 1931), it only seems right and natural that the best place to gain an authentic experience on March 17 is in the country that regards St Patrick as its patron saint.

How I got to take part in this event is kind of surreal. Even now, seven days on, I'm still scratching my head and wondering if it really happened. Perhaps it was just some kind of odd dream.

As a professional journalist, I've gone on overnight trips to interview people or cover events outside of London. But in 12 years of working for specialist newspapers and magazines here in the UK, I've never gone on a fully blown "press trip" in which you are wined and dined by a particular organisation for several days, put up in a very nice hotel and given free access to events and venues you'd normally pay through the nose to attend.

Ironically, having forsaken my job as a magazine editor last November to enjoy a bit of a "career break", it was my role as a blogger that provided me with an opportunity to visit Dublin on a three-day press trip as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

As you will no doubt know, Ireland's going through a rough patch right now. Thanks to the 2008 banking crisis the Celtic Tiger has crumbled and the country is in the grip of a major recession. The Republic was controversially bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, but the money loaned needs to be paid back at extortionate interest rates.There's a very real fear that Ireland will never recover financially.

According to this article in The Telegraph, Ireland has the highest level of household debt relative to disposable income in the developed world at 190 per cent, while the Lincoln Tribune reports that up to 100,000 people will emigrate by April 2012, worse than the previous record of 40,000 during the recession in the late 1980s.

Tourism, therefore, is seen as one way of helping to drive the economy. Encourage people from around the world to visit Ireland, and they'll spend their money, which, in turn, keeps people in jobs and helps businesses grow and thrive. And, let's face it, the country has so much to offer in terms of culture and scenery, it's hard not to view it as a wonderful destination regardless of the current economic crisis.

Fáilte Ireland (National Tourism Development Agency), which is also known in various guises around the world as Tourism Ireland or Discover Ireland, went all out this year to invite an international contingent of media -- print journalists, broadcasters, photographers, bloggers -- to the St Patrick's Festival in order to showcase the parade, the city of Dublin and Ireland as a whole to the world.

My invite came because much of the festival's activities had a literary theme. That's largely due to Dublin being named a UNESCO City of Literature last July.

It seemed fitting, therefore, for all the media covering the parade to meet up at the Dublin Writers Museum on the morning of March 17. We were given a shamrock "corsage" to wear and got to mill around the venue, before being briefed by the organisers.

We were also taken on a behind-the-scenes tour of the parade preparations nearby. This provided lots of great photographic opportunities, especially from the children taking part who loved mugging for the camera and striking poses.

We got treated to a delicious breakfast, complete with a flambéed Irish coffee-making demonstration (yes, I drank one, even if it was 11 in the morning!), before we boarded a specially designated open-top double-decker bus. Now, this is the truly surreal part, because the bus, with 30 or so media representatives on board, got to lead the parade.

So, there we were, all wearing silly hats (did I mention the hats? the ones our tourism hosts handed out? mine was adorned in bells, a bit like a jester's, so that every time I moved my head I thought I had tinnitus), sitting on the bus and going down O'Connell Street, waving to everyone and having our photographs taken.

We had our very own MC on board, who, shamefully, I didn't know, but have since clocked he's a rather famous RTE television presenter and former boy band member, hence the constant screams coming to us from teenage girls in the crowd.

It was a rather awesome experience, going down the main thoroughfare and being greeted like superstars. I have never seen so much green in my life. It was a sea of green hats and green outfits stretching the length and breadth of O'Connell Street. Some people had dyed their hair green, others had painted shamrocks on their faces, many were waving tricolour flags.

Vantage points were important. Along with the crowds of people lining the route, there were others hanging out of upper-floor windows or perched on statues or street signs.

I loved seeing all the children lined up -- some of them would have been waiting for hours, and as the first "float" in the parade we received a really enthusiastic welcome -- smiling and waving and brimming with joy. And, to be honest, that's the best word I can think of to sum up the whole experience: joyful.

By the time we'd traversed the first mile-and-a-half of the parade route my cheekbones were hurting from smiling so much. And I had a sore arm from waving.

After alighting from our moving bus, we got to sit in a stationery media bus in a prime viewing location. This allowed us to watch the rest of the parade as it passed us by and take as many photographs as we wanted. There was wifi on board, which meant we could tweet or blog the experience, but sadly my BlackBerry wasn't much up for the job. (Mental note, buy an iPhone.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, the parade's theme was based on a short story, called Brilliant!, written by Roddy Doyle especially for the day. (Note, you can download it from his official website for free.) It's a child-like tale about Dublin losing its funny bone and being haunted by the black dog of depression, but ends on an optimistic, upbeat note.

Each of the eight chapters was interpreted by different groups, although dogs and bones seemed a common theme in many of the "floats" and "presentations". The ingenuity, creativity and time that must have gone into them all was phenomenal, and it was so clear that many of them had really thought about the story and done their all to bring it to life in a way that must have truly excited and impressed the man who conjured it all up out of his imagination.

I took more than 100 photographs during the parade, but have edited them down to a more manageable 60-plus, which you can view in the slideshow below. Alternatively, you can view the gallery in a bigger format on my SmugMug page. Enjoy!

 

UPDATE

Just to prove I was there, and to satisfy the curious who asked for photographic evidence, I have now tracked down a picture of Yours Truly onboard the bus. Note the tri-colour jester's hat!

Reading Henning Mankell's 'The Man From Beijing' by a pond in a park

For god knows how many years I've sat in offices, peered out the window on sunny days and wished I could escape with a good book. Today, with no plans other than an exhaustive schedule of blog posts to write (my trip to Dublin has really got the creative juices working over-time), I decided to do exactly that.

So, I got myself all kitted up for a longish cycle, packed a book in my bag and headed off to Richmond Park, which is about 4 miles away.

I then found myself a park bench near a little pond and settled myself down for a couple of hours reading. It was blissful. It was just me, the ducks and the odd family group (mainly grandparents with toddlers), enjoying the peaceful surrounds and the beautiful sunshine. Roll on summer!

PS> What are you reading at the moment?

DublinSwell 2011: Paul Durcan's poetry leaves us reeling in the aisles

There's a fine line between comedy and tragedy, and the poetry of Paul Durcan treads it perfectly.

At DublinSwell last Friday night, wearing black trousers and a bright canary yellow jumper, he regaled us with several poems, each one more hilarious than the last, and I'd barely caught my breath before he was reading us something else.

Poetry, on the page, doesn't usually make sense to me. But hearing it read out loud, by the person who wrote it, was mesmerising.

Durcan has an expressive voice. It rises and falls with emotion, he whispers some lines, croons others, occasionally he shouts. It all adds up to a powerful performance.

Two poems stood out for me. The first, hilariously entitled The Woman Who Kept Her Breasts in the Garden, was, well, hilarious.

The second, Golden Mothers Driving West, started off as a laugh-out-loud comedy, about three elderly woman doing a runner from their nursing home in a stolen car, before it mutated into a poignant, tragic tale about the past, and, finally, death.

I've taken the liberty of reproducing the poem in full below, which I found on The Ireland Chair of Poetry website:

Golden Mothers Driving West, words by Paul Durcan

The inevitable call came from the Alzheimer’s nursing
     home.
Mummy had been sitting there in an armchair for two
     years
In a top-storey room with two other aged ladies,
Deborah O’Donoghue and Maureen Timoney.
Three Irish orang-utans, silent, stationary.
The call was to say that between 3 and 5 a.m.
The three of them had gone missing from the room.
At first it was thought that all three had slipped
Out the window, ajar in the hot, humid night.
But, no, there were no torsos in the flowerbed.
It transpired that a car had also gone missing.
Was it thinkable they had commandeered a car?
At five in the afternoon the police called
To say that a Polish youth in a car wash in Kinnegad
Had washed and hot-waxed a car for three ladies,
All of whom were wearing golden dressing gowns –
Standard issue golden dressing gowns
Worn by all the inmates of the Alzheimer’s nursing
    home.
Why he remembered them was that he was struck
By the fact that all three ladies were laughing
For the ten minutes it took him to wash the car.
‘I am surprised,’ he stated, ‘by laughter.’
At 9 p.m. the car was sighted in Tarmonbarry
On the Roscommon side of the River Shannon,
Parked at the jetty of the Emerald Star marina.
At 9.30 p.m. a female German child was taken
To the police station at Longford by her stepfather.
The eleven-year-old had earlier told her stepfather
In the cabin of their hired six-berth river cruiser
That she had seen three ladies jump from the bridge.
Her stepfather had assumed his daughter imagined it
As she was, he told police, ‘a day-dreamer born’.
The girl repeated her story to the police:
How three small, thin, aged ladies with white hair
Had, all at once, together, jumped from the bridge,
Their dressing gowns flying behind them in the breeze.
What colours were the dressing gowns? she was asked.
‘They are wearing gold,’ she replied.
Wreathed on the weir downstream from the bridge
Police sub-aqua divers retrieved the three bodies,
One of whom, of course, was my own emaciated
    mother,
Whose fingerprints were later found on the wheel of
    the car.
She had been driving west, west to Westport,
Westport on the west coast of Ireland
In the County of Mayo,
Where she had grown up with her mother and sisters
In the War of Independence and the Civil War,
Driving west to Streamstown three miles outside
    Westport,
Where on afternoons in September in 1920,
Ignoring the roadblocks and the assassinations,
They used walk down Sunnyside by the sea’s edge,
The curlews and the oystercatchers,
The upturned black currachs drying out on the stones,
And picnic on the machair grass above the seaweed,
Under the chestnut trees turning autumn gold
And the fuchsia bleeding like troupes of crimson-tutu’d
    ballerinas in the black hedgerows.
Standing over my mother’s carcass in the morgue,
A sheep’s skull on a slab,
A girl in her birth-gown blown across the sand,
I shut my eyes:
Thank you, O golden mother,
For giving me a life,
A spear of rain.
After a long life searching for a little boy who lives
    down the lane
You never found him, but you never gave up;
In your afterlife nightie
You are pirouetting expectantly for the last time.  

I was so taken by Paul Durcan's performance, I bought one of his books (A Snail in My Prime) the next day. He now has the dubious honour of being the author of the very first poetry book added to my personal library.

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Pechorin's Journal

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers and other bookish bods to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles and new bloggers.

Today's guest is Max Cairnduff, who blogs at Pechorin's Journal.

Max is an energy and infrastructure lawyer living and working in London. As well as having a great love of books, he also has a huge love of music and film, which he tries to fit in along with work, games of various sorts, trips to the theatre and the occasional holiday. Max is also rather fond of cocktails (particularly absinthe-based ones).

He is married with two small cats.

Without further ado, here's Max's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

 

Flaubert doesn't need an introduction and nor does Madame Bovary. In a way that's the problem the book has -- long before I read it I felt like I'd already heard everything there was to say about it.

 

Hearing about it doesn't prepare you, though, for its sheer brilliance. The quality of the prose is extraordinary. It has tremendous psychological subtlety. It's pretty much as good as literature gets. I've yet to read a better book.

 

A book that changed my world: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

 

I divide my reading largely between literary fiction and crime. Raymond Chandler is both. The opening paragraphs of The Big Sleep are rightly famous and the first time I read them they ignited a love affair between me and hard-boiled fiction, which has continued to this day. With time, that led me to other crime sub-genres such as noir and pulp, but Chandler was the start of it all.

 

There's far more depth to Chandler than is often realised, but it's the attitude and prose that make me love him. "I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it." Perfect.

 

A book that deserves a wider audience: The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb

 

I spent a lot of time thinking about this one. I've read a lot of books over the past couple of years which cry out for a wider audience. What made me pick The Pendragon Legend was how it matches wit and humanity with some simply wonderful writing. It's funny, it's dazzling and it's clever. Comic novels are difficult to do well but Szerb pulls it off with absolute aplomb.

 

Szerb was a Hungarian author and I read The Pendragon Legend in translation (by Len Rix). Somehow I hadn't expected early twentieth-century Hungarian fiction to be this fun and I put off reading this book for ages after I bought it. Don't make the same mistake I did.

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Thanks, Max, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday!

What do you think of Max's choices? Have you read any of these books? I've got a lovely Everyman's Library edition of Madame Bovary (courtesy of KevinfromCanada) sitting in my TBR. Not read Chandler, although I should rectify it, because I do enjoy a good crime novel. And I've now added the Zreb to my wishlist.

DublinSwell 2011: Mike Scott interprets W.B. Yeats' epic poems 'September 1913' and 'Let The Earth Bear Witness' in song

As much as I love literature, I have a mental block when it comes to poetry. I simply don't "get it". For that reason I've never bothered to read W.B. Yeats, arguably Ireland's greatest poet.

But at DublinSwell on Friday night the poetry of Yeats was brought to life by Mike Scott, a Edinburgh-born Dublin-based singer songwriter, best known as the founder of The Waterboys in 1984. Scott's influences are steeped in literature and his most recent project has been to create an entire suite of Yeats' poetry set to music.

He performed two of these poems on the night, the first September 1913, which you can view on YouTube below.

 

September 1913 words by W.B. Yeats

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, 'Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

The second was a very profound and incredibly moving rendition of Yeats' Let The Earth Bear Witness, which Scott dedicated to "all the people of the earth struggling for self-determination".

As he performed the song, accompanied by Iona Marshall on guitar, a video from the recent protests in Iran was screened behind him. This powerful imagery took on greater potency when accompanied by Yeats' words, almost as if they had been written for the revolutionary times in which we live. It was an emotional way to end a brilliant evening of words and voices...

 

Let The Earth Bear Witness by W.B. Yeats

They shall be remembered for ever
They shall be alive for ever
They shall be speaking for ever
The people shall hear them for ever

Let the sea bear witness
Let the wind bear witness
Let the earth bear witness
Let the stars bear witness!

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

DublinSwell 2011: a celebration of one city's love affair with words

If there is one city in the world where a star-studded cast of writers -- whether of prose, play, poetry or song -- lives and works it is Dublin, Ireland. So it was fitting that so many of them gathered in the newly built Convention Centre Dublin, on the banks of the Liffey, on Friday night to celebrate Dublin's recent listing as a UNESCO City of Literature, one of only four cities* in the world to be designated as such.

As an admirer of Irish literature, I felt a little like all my Christmases had come at once. It's no exaggeration to say I hadn't been this excited about seeing a line-up like this since I watched LiveAid on TV 25 years ago!

In her opening remarks Margaret Hayes, Dublin City librarian and Chair, Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, described it as "the largest single literary event in Ireland's history". She might also have added that it was the longest event in the country's history, because the evening, which got off to a delayed start, ran until 11.45pm. But the quality of the performances was so exceptional I don't think anyone in the 2,000-strong crowd minded.

There was rarely a dull moment in the programme, which featured everyone from novelists Sebastian Barry and Joseph O'Connor, to songwriters Mike Scott and Damien Dempsey. There were multi-talented writers such as novelist and film-maker Neil Jordan, actors from the Abbey Theatre performing acts from plays by Sean O'Casey and Marina Carr, and a host of poets, including Ireland's only living Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney, who received a standing ovation when he walked onto the stage.

Over the next few days I will cover performance highlights (by which I mean the people that made a particular impression on me) in more detail in a series of separate posts. In the meantime, here's an overview of the programme, divided into the categories of song, poetry, prose and script.

SONG
Can there be a more appropriate song to open an event celebrating Irish words than The Auld Triangle? The lyrics to this unofficial Dublin anthem were written by Dominic Behan in 1954 for his brother, the writer Brendan Behan. The tune is based on a traditional Irish song called Galway Shawl, but it's the memorable chorus -- "And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle / All along the banks of the Royal Canal" -- that makes it such a terrific song for a singalong.

Indeed, Damien Dempsey, who performed the song on the night, had the crowd singing along while he took a step back from the microphone. The sound of 2,000 voices beginning tentatively and finishing with great roar and vigour was spine-tingling.

Dempsey later performed a song of his own, Sing All Our Cares Away, which was similarly impressive.

But the true musical star of the night was Mike Scott. I'll talk about him at length in a later post, but he performed three songs (with Iona Marshall), including the one for which he is probably most famous -- This is the Sea -- and two interpretations of W.B. Yeats' poems -- September 1913 and Let The Earth Bear Witness -- which were so mesmerising I think I might have become an accidental devotee of poetry, an art form I've previously thought "difficult" and "pretentious".

Lisa Hannigan, whose work I'm familiar with via her association with Irish songwriter and musician Damien Rice (she was a member of his band and sang backing vocals but left to pursue a solo career in 2008), performed a haunting song called Lille, her ethereal voice ringing out across the audience.

And, finally, Robbie Overson, who is a member of Irish folk fusion group Scullion, performed a guitar instrumental to accompany a reading of Ghost Light by novelist Joseph O'Connor. It was a fascinating combination of O'Connor's silky, modulated reading voice with the rich warm tones of an acoustic guitar, and certainly a different approach to a normal reading where an author stands in front of a microphone and you can usually hear the sound of a pin drop.

POETRY
I'll be the first to put up my hand and say that poetry is not my thing, but the line-up of poets on the DublinSwell bill might have changed that forever. Hearing poetry read aloud, by the people who wrote it, has transformed the way I view it. The tone and musicality, the rhythm and beat of it, came alive for me on Friday night.

First, there was Seamus Heaney, an undeniable legend and grand master, who read three poems -- Casualty, Chorus and Postscript -- but it was Paul Durcan's sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic-comic poetry that sold me. (Ironically, I had been sitting next to him for the first part of the show, completely oblivious to his fame and talent as the "inspired minstrel of modern day Ireland"). He read a handful of poems, including The Cleaner Woman and The Woman Who Kept Her Breasts in the Back Garden, that had the audience shrieking with laughter.

Paula Meehan, who is better known as a playwright, read two poems in a flat Dublin accent, the first of which was about her grandmother's vicious opinion of the Catholic church, or, more specifically the priests "who are dirty feckers", which had all the more fire because of the monotone in which it was delivered.

The Irish language poet (with the English name) Biddy Jenkinson was indisposed on the evening, but her poem Ab Dhroimeanaigh was read by an unnamed performer, accompanied by a saxophonist and a slide show. Sadly, it was all in Irish, so I had no idea what it was about. But it sounded beautiful.

Multi-talented writer Dermot Bolger read a moving poem, Venice, dedicated to his late wife. He was accompanied by his two sons, Donnacha and Diarmuid, tall gangly young men, who performed a song, Sad and Beautiful, on guitar and mandolin. I thought it was the one weak spot of the evening, possibly because I didn't understand the background to it, which is explained in this piece in the Irish Times.

PROSE
The line-up of novelists to do readings of their work, both published and forth-coming, was like a veritable who's who of the Irish literary world.

I've already name-checked Joseph O'Connor (see above under "music"), but another of my favourite writers Sebastian Barry was also in attendance. His reading of A Long Long Way was quite theatrical, but I'll expand on that in a separate post.

The grand master of popular contemporary Irish writing, Roddy Doyle, who seemed slightly nervous, read an extract of his short story Brilliant! which was specially commissioned for the St Patrick's Festival and brought to life during the St Patrick's Day parade through the streets of Dublin the day before. He's obviously very warmly regarded by the people of Dublin judging by the reaction of the audience, first when he walked on stage and later after he completed his reading.

Gerry Stembridge, an author with whom I wasn't previously familiar, read an extract from a forthcoming novel, as did Christine Dwyer-Hickey and chick-lit author Cathy Kelly.

Crime novelist Declan Hughes read the first chapter of City of Lost Girls, Claire Kilroy (another favourite of mine) read from her latest novel All Names Have Been Changed and Neil Jordan read the ending of his newest work Mistaken.

And just to prove that not all Irish novels are dark and depressing (as someone recently commented on this blog), Paul Howard, aka middle-class South Dublin snob Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, had the entire audience in hysterics with his reading of Mr S. and the Secrets of Andorra's Box. I'd never heard of Paul before but he made such an impression, I'll be devoting a separate post on him shortly.

Writers, long since dead, also had their work read on stage, including Samuel Beckett's Watt (hilarious), Oscar Wilde's child's fairy story The Selfish Giant and James Joyce's A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man.

SCRIPT
Actors from the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theatre founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, performed several pieces during the evening, each of them more powerful than the last. They included Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, Mark O'Rowe's Terminus and Marina Carr's Marble. Again, I'll write more about this in a separate post.

Eamon Morrissey, who is an actor, director and writer, performed Jonathan Swift's 1729 satire A Modest Proposal (full title: A Model Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick). As well as giving the audience many belly laughs, he kept us all in suspense as he wandered the stage, wielding a set of carving knives and threatening to lift the white cloth off a dish sitting on the table in front of him. We were all very fearful of what might lie beneath it...

The Convention Centre Dublin, all lit up in green as part of the St Patrick's Festival 2011.

RUNNING ORDER
Mike Murphy Master of Ceremonies
Margaret Hayes Chair, Dublin UNESCO City of Literature
President of Ireland Mary McAleese

Damien Dempsey Dominic Behan's The Auld Triangle
Barry McGovern Samuel Beckett's Watt
Christine Dwyer-Hickey The Cold Eye of Heaven
Biddy Jenkinson Ab Dhroimeanaigh (music by Seán McErlaine, imagery by Margaret Lonergan)
Sebastian Barry A Long Long Way
Abbey Theatre Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars
Mike Scott (with Iona Marshall) W.B. Yeats' September 1913
Gerry Stembridge Unspoken
Eamon Morrissey Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal
Claire Kilroy All Names Have Been Changed
Abbey Theatre Mark O'Rowe's Terminus
Lisa Hannigan Lille
Seamus Heaney Poems

[Interval]

Paul Durcan Poems
Declan Hughes City of Lost Girls
Dermot Bolger (with Donnacha & Diarmuid Bolger) Sad and Beautiful/Venice
Mike Scott (with Iona Marshall) This Is The Sea
Paula Meehan Poems
Damien Dempsey Sing All Our Cares Away
Paul Howard (Ross O'Carroll-Kelly) Mr S. and the Secrets of Andorra's Box
Cathy Kelly You've Got Mail
Abbey Theatre Marina Carr's Marble
Neil Jordan Mistaken
Claire Kilroy Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant
Joseph O'Connor (with Robbie Overson) Ghost Light
Roddy Doyle Brilliant!
Sebastian Barry James Joyce's A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
Mike Scott (with Iona Marshall) W.B. Yeats' Let The Earth Bear Witness

 

*The others are Melbourne, Edinburgh and Iowa City.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

Dublin celebrates St Patrick's Day by bringing a Roddy Doyle short story to life

Yesterday was St Patrick's Day, and Dublin was transformed into a sea of green.

This year's annual parade celebrated Dublin's recent listing as a UNESCO City of Literature by bringing a specially commissioned short story by Roddy Doyle to life. There were dozens of "floats" interpreting each chapter of Brilliant! (which can be downloaded from Roddy Doyle's official website) and the amount of imagination, effort and time that went into each one was phenomenal.

I was lucky enough to be with a contingent of international journalists in an open-top double-decker bus that lead the parade. It was an amazing experience, full of laughter, excitement, joy -- and a little bit of cold weather!

I'll post more pictures when I've had a chance to sort through them all -- and I'll write more about what it was like to be in the parade, too. In the meantime, check out the kids in the photograph above: their faces sum up the day perfectly!

Gearing up for St Patrick's Day, here's 75 Irish book reviews to inspire you

No matter where you go in Ireland right now, you can't move for shamrocks -- or, to be more precise, glittery green shamrock-shaped stickers. These stickers, big, small and in between, are being stuck up in shop windows and the interior walls of pubs in every town up and down Eire.

But this sudden onslaught of shamrocks has some stiff competition in the form of tri-colour balloons and tri-colour bunting, both of which are being strung up in high streets (as well as shops, pubs, schools, libraries) right across the country.

I have been in Ireland since Friday, and no matter where I've been, whether its County Wexford in the south-east or County Leitrim in the Midlands, every community is gearing up for St Patrick's Day in a big way. (I'll be in Dublin on the day myself, thanks to an invitation from Fáilte Ireland to take part in the annual St Patrick's Day festival, which I'll be covering on this blog in due course.)

To mark the occasion, I thought I'd celebrate Irish literature by gathering all my Irish book reviews, split into fiction and non-fiction, in one place for your enjoyment. Happy reading!

FICTION

John Banville:
The Sea (2005)

Sebastian Barry:
Annie Dunne (2002)
A Long Long Way (2005)
The Secret Scripture (2009)

Samuel Beckett:
Krapp's Last Tape and Embers (1958)

Maeve Binchy:  
Nights of Rain and Stars (2005) 
Whitethorn Woods (2007)

Benjamin Black:
Christine Falls (2006)

John Boyne:
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2007)

Maeve Brennan:
The Visitor (2000)

Michael Collins:
The Keepers of Truth (2001) 
Lost Souls (2003)

J.P. Donleavy:
The Ginger Man (1955)

Emma Donoghue:
Room (2010)

Tana French:
In The Woods (2008)
The Likeness (2009)
Faithful Place (2010)

Alan Glynn:
Winterland (2009)

Christine Dwyer Hickey:
Tatty (2006)

Anne Enright:
The Gathering (2007)

Hugo Hamilton:
Disguise (2009)

Aidan Higgins:
Langrishe Go Down (1966)

M.J. Hyland*:
Carry Me Down (2006)

Jennifer Johnston:
The Gates (1973) 
Shadows on Our Skin (1977)
The Old Jest (1979)
The Christmas Tree (1981)
The Invisible Worm (1992)
The Illusionist (1995)
Two Moons (1998)
The Gingerbread Woman (2000)
Foolish Mortals (2007)
Truth or Fiction (2009)

James Joyce:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Patrick Kavanagh:
Tarry Flynn (1948)

Molly Keane:
Time After Time (1983)

Denis Kehoe:
Walking on Dry Land (2011)

Claire Kilroy:
Tenderwire (2007) 
All Names Have Been Changed (2009)

John MacKenna:
The Last Fine Summer (1997) 
The Space Between Us (2009)

Mark Macauley:
The House of Slamming Doors (2010)

Walter Macken:
Seek the Fair Land (1959)

Deidre Madden:  
One by One in the Darkness (1997)
Molly Fox's Birthday (2009)

Patrick McCabe: 
Winterwood (2006)

John McGahern:
The Barracks (1963)
The Dark (1965)
The Leavetaking (1975)
Amongst Women (1990)
That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001)

Brian McGilloway:
Borderlands (2008)

Eoin McNamee:
12.23. Paris. 31 August 1997 (2007)

Edna O'Brien:
In the Forest (2002)

Brendan O'Connoll:
The Mammy (1994)

Anne-Marie O'Connor:
Everyone's Got A Bono Story (2004)

Joseph O'Connor:  
Star of the Sea (2003) 
Ghost Light (2010)

Nuala O'Faolain:
My Dream of You (2002)

Ed O'Loughlin:
Not Untrue & Not Unkind (2009)

Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland (2009)

Keith Ridgway:
Horses (2003)

Colm Tóibín:
 The Blackwater Lightship (1999)
Brooklyn (2009)

William Trevor:
Felicia's Journey (1994)
The Story of Lucy Gault (2003)

Katharine Weber:
The Music Lesson (1997)

Oscar Wilde:
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Niall Williams:  
As it is in Heaven (1999)
The Fall of Light (2001)
Only Say The Word (2004)

NON-FICTION

John McGahern:
Memoir (2005)

Nualo O'Faolian:
Are You Somebody? (1997)
Almost There (2003)

J.M. Synge:
The Aran Islands (1907)

*MJ Hyland is British by birth and Australian-raised, but she is of Irish extraction, and this novel is set in Ireland, so I have included it on this list.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Guy Savage

After a bit of a hiatus, I'm pleased to announce the return of Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers and other bookish bods to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles and new bloggers.

Today's guest is Guy Savage from His Futile Preoccupations....

Guy, who is British but lives in America, has a terrific blog jam-packed with wonderful reviews, mainly of classics -- Russian, French and English from the 19th century -- crime and noir fiction.

"Books have always been a consolation and an escape for me," he states on his About page. "I can remember learning to read, and I still feel a thrill when I disappear into a new book and realize that I’m engaged in reading something wonderful, something I’ll always remember. I cannot imagine a life without books."

Without further ado, here's Guy's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: Cousin Bette by Honore Balzac

There are so many books I could slot into this category, but I'm going to choose one I think about a great deal. It just happens to be written by one of my favourite authors -- Balzac.

Cousin Bette is a tale of a spinster who's the poor relation of the wealthy Parisian Hulot family. This novel is a great favourite for Balzac's approach to the complications and murky depths of human behaviour. It illustrates the timelessness of human behaviour, and how easy it is to destroy a human being if you are ready to exploit their weaknesses.

Balzac understood human nature so well, and here he is at the top of his game as he explores the complicated emotions that swirl inside Bette's head. Since the Hulots are her benefactors, it's assumed that she is grateful to them, but instead she nurses hate and secretly swears to destroy them all. Just how she does this is the substance of this superb novel. The key to the destruction of the Hulots is found in their personal weaknesses, so Bette doesn't really have to 'do' a lot to lead the family into destruction. She's there at key moments and she helps arrange key incidents, but basically the Hulots open the door to their destruction.

One of the things that intrigues me so much about this novel (it's one of my favourite Balzac novels, by the way) is the way in which all the kindnesses directed towards Bette are taken by her as insulting and degrading. As readers, it's fairly easy for us to see that, logically, without the Hulots she'd be in dire circumstances, but at the same time, it's also easy for the nasty side in each of us (come on, admit it's there) to understand exactly how Bette feels with each cast-off, with each paltry acknowledgment, and with each assumption that a hideous suitor is 'good' enough for her.

She isn't an equal and she knows that she never will be. She may have food and clothing, but none of this is free, and in return she is supposed to be devoted to making the lives of the Hulots smoother. She despises Baroness Hulot and realises that if fate had turned one way instead of another, she could have been a baroness instead of the poor relation who's expected to be happy with the crumbs from everyone else's table.

"Envy remained like a germ plague which may come to life and devastate a city if the fatal bale of wool in which it lies hidden is ever opened."

 

A book that changed my world: Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir by Eddie Muller

There are many books (and films) which served as signposts at various points in my life, but I'm narrowing it down to one. In 2004, I read an article in the newspaper announcing the 2nd Annual Noir City Film Festival organised by the Film Noir Foundation. I read the lineup and rued the fact that I was unable to go. I was busy chafing against my lot in life when I said, "damn it, I'll have my own festival."

I didn't know much about film noir at the time, and like most people, I was familiar with some of the more ubiquitous titles in the genre (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, etc). So reading that Eddie Muller was the person responsible for putting the film festival together, I ordered a copy of his marvellous book Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir -- along with a selection of a number of the films to be shown at the film festival.

The book is incredible. Muller has a fresh, lively and evocative style that meshes perfectly with the subject matter, and I recommend the book to anyone who wants to get jump-started with noir. Well, after reading the book (and drooling over the fabulous photos) the result was that I fell in love with noir, and gradually -- well, to be honest, not so gradually -- it consumed and obsessed me. Noir is described by some experts as a genre; others say it's a style, and while I'm not arguing with either of those positions, for me: noir is a state of mind.

When I read Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, everything slotted into place: the way I felt about life, man's struggle in society, and the immutability of human behaviour. It was as if noir had been there all this time hiding in some dark, forgotten corner...waiting for me to discover its dark, bleak nihilistic core. Since 2004, there's been no looking back, and the love affair with noir continues.

In 2007, I became a fairly regular contributor to the Film Noir of the Week blog, and in 2010, I began contributing to the Film Noir Foundation's e-newsletter, The Sentinel.


A book that deserves a wider audience: A Matter of Life and Sex by Oscar Moore

This was an easy choice. While I'm putting this under the selection "A book that deserves a wider audience", by its subject matter, the book, unfortunately narrows itself. This is a beautiful, poignant, graphic, gut-wrenching and tragic tale of a young man named Hugo (14 when the book begins), who slides into a sordid life of prostitution, pornography and drugs. The drugs begin as fun but inevitably become the seemingly protective yet ultimately self-destructive sheath with which Hugo deals with his vulnerability.

Hugo becomes mired in an ugly life before he has the maturity to understand his actions, and then by the time he does mature, he is irrevocably damaged. Hugo has no moral compass, no barriers, no reason to put on the brakes, and if you read the book, you commit to Hugo's journey to hell.

This is an immensely powerful book -- and at its conclusion, I felt traumatized by its sheer, raw emotional power. Dark & bleak, this harrowing tale was the only novel written by journalist Oscar Moore, who died of AIDS in 1996 at age 36. If Oscar Moore had lived, he would have been a major contributor to British fiction, and this incredible novel stands as a testament to the loss of his tremendous talent:
 

"It wasn't that he felt guilty. Hugo had never noticed a conscience. If he had one, it was rarely awake. The flicker in his eye in the mirror in the lift wasn't an accusation. It was a signal. A flash. A half-smile. Tentative, to himself. He couldn't indulge it because then he'd laugh, and the laugh wouldn't come, or cry, and no tears would happen. He just stared back as if he'd never seen himself before. He just stared at himself and, with a slight intake of breath, stepped out of the lift, down the beige carpet corridors and knocked on another painted door with three gilt numbers."

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Thanks, Guy, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday!

What do you think of Guy's choices? Have you read any of these books? I'm particularly intrigued by the Balzac and the Moore.

New acquisitions: a swag of Irish books from the Irish book fair

This time last week I discovered a little slice of heaven on earth: an Irish book fair just a 10-minute stroll from my home!

The fair, held at the Irish Cultural Centre, was billed as "London's largest event for the sale of new, second-hand, old, rare and nearly new Irish fiction and non-fiction".

I had a lovely time rummaging through the tables of secondhand fiction and could have quite easily walked away with 100 or more titles! In the end I settled for 8 titles -- one reference book and seven novels -- for the princely sum of £21.

Here's what I bought (in no particular order):

• Waterstone's Guide to Irish Books (Published in 1998, so slightly out of date, but jam packed with lots of information about Irish writers)

• Kate O'Brien's The Last of Summer (Never read anything by O'Brien before, but she's regarded as one of Ireland's greatest writers -- she died in 1974)

• Colm O'Gaora's A Crooked Field (I'll admit the quote on the cover sold it to me: "There's a grace and understated simplicity to his prose...reminiscent of John McGahern and William Trevor")

• William Trevor's Three Early Novels: The Old Boys, The Boarding House, and The Love Department (I've read a few of Trevor's later novels, but not the early ones included in this hefty collection)

• Dermot Bolger's A Second Life (A story about a middle-aged man who decides to hunt out his biological mother)

• Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (Set in Derry, this one was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996)

• Sean O'Faolain's And Again? (O'Faolain was a short-story writer, but this one is a fantasy novel in which a 65-year-old man must make a choice to be run down by a lorry in 30 minutes time or live his life backwards)

• John Banville's The Book of Evidence (I read this one 20 years ago, but have lately been thinking I'd like to re-read it)

Anyone read any of these books? Thoughts on where to start?

Warning: graphic violence ahead

I've spent the past two days thoroughly immersed in a biography (of sorts) of Martin Bryant, the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre -- the world's worst by a lone gunman -- in which 35 innocent people were gunned down on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April 1996. It's a fascinating account of a man who was deeply troubled from a very early age, who didn't fit in with society at large and who took his revenge by shooting indiscriminately around a popular tourist attraction with no empathy or realisation of the consequences of his actions.

If you trawl through my archives, or look at my true crime page, you'll see I have a fascination with these kinds of books, not because I revel in their gruesomeness but because I'm intrigued by what makes people carry out these kinds of atrocities. I do not believe that the perpetrators do these terrible things because they are evil, because I simply don't believe evil exists. To label people and their actions "evil" is akin to putting them in a box and saying "we don't want to understand this" and, as a result, we, as a society, never get to the bottom of the cause.

Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer is one of those books that tries to put the crime in the context of Martin Bryant's life. Was he predestined, genetically, to murder all those people, or was it the way he was raised? Was it nurture, or nature? And if we can figure out what caused him to commit these murders can we prevent other people from going on similar killing sprees in the future?

I don't want to go into the ins and outs of it now -- I'll do that in my review -- but I was a bit surprised to come across this page (see photograph above), towards the rear of the book, this morning. It's a warning, really, that what is to follow may be too upsetting for delicate readers. I've never seen anything like this in a book before, and I wondered what its point was, because surely anyone who reads the Martin Bryant biography already knows the basic details of the case anyway -- they know what happened at the cafe, the toll booth, the car park -- so why bury it in a section at the back?

The authors, two acclaimed journalists, state that they decided to put the chapters on the killings at the back of the book "to give readers the choice of avoiding graphic violence".

But it makes me wonder how many would get that far into the book -- the warning comes on page 313 -- and then decide they weren't going to go any further? Would you abandon the book, or want to keep reading on? Is this kind of disclaimer really necessary? Or is a warning about graphic violence a good thing? I'd love to hear your views.

'Walking on Dry Land' by Denis Kehoe

Fiction - paperback; Serpent's Tail; 248 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Denis Kehoe is a young Irish writer, based in Dublin. Walking on Dry Land is his second novel. But the story is not your typical Irish fare: this one is set in Portugal and Angola, and has a distinct West African feel about it.

Admittedly, this is not what I expected when I requested the title from the publisher and for the first 50 or so pages I had trouble orientating myself. But once I got my head around the location -- and the storyline -- I found myself thoroughly enjoying it, particularly as it has the pace of a thriller without sacrificing the meatiness of the content. And there's something about the prose style, and the shortness of the chapters, that lulled me into a dream-like state, so that whenever I put the book down I felt as if I was still caught up in its pages.

The story is an age old one, about a woman's search for the mother she never knew, but it's told in a refreshing way.

Ana is in her early 30s and was raised by her Portuguese parents in Lisbon. She's now a professor of film studies and is doing her PhD at Trinity College Dublin, where she resides. (That, you see, is the Irish connection.)

Ana's mother has recently died (of breast cancer), prompting her to investigate the secret she's always kept hidden to herself: that her birth mother was not a white Portuguese woman, but a black woman from Angola, with whom her father had an affair. This knowledge has been something she has kept to herself her entire life.

Her first memory of not truly belonging to her family happened when she was four, as she was walking down a Lisbon street with her elder brother, Tiago, and two gossiping neighbours stared at her.

But it took Ana a few more moments to figure out that the two sets of dry, hungry eyes were trained directly on her, that they had been following her. And to understand the words they were swapping were careless scissors set to snip her apart, two dogs barking at her heels. Yes, all of a sudden she was coldly certain these two women were busy trading versions of where she came from. Of who she really belonged to, for as sure as they were guardians of order and respectability in Carcavelos, this child, almost white but not quite, was not the offspring of José and Helena de Castro. There was a story here, a scandal here, and they were so busy inventing their own versions of it, they didn't expect the voice shouting at them from the other side of the street. "Senhoras, calem a boca! Close your mouths! Close your mouths or the flies will get in! The flies will get in!"

Armed with a photograph and a vague idea that her biological mother might have been a cabaret singer, Ana heads to Luanda, the capital of Angola, to begin her search. Her brother, Tiaga, also happens to live in Luanda, so her trip is disguised as a visit to catch up with him and his young family.

Ana's story is undercut, in alternate chapters, with the story of her parent's -- Helena and José. Beginning in Lisbon in October 1965, it traces their romance, marriage and new life in Luanda, where they settle and have children in the early 1970s. These chapters, short and sweet, provide the narrative tension that makes you want to keep reading on, because how could these two idealistic, young adults move from romantic love to one in which José screws around with the native women?

What I liked most about this book, aside from the great characters (Ana's mother, Solange, is particularly well drawn), was the little insights into Angola's troubled history, particularly its relationship with Portugal, which ruled it as an overseas territory until 1975. These snippets, including Helena and José having to flee the war that erupted during independence, gives the narrative a distinct flavour.

And I liked the constant references to films -- one chapter's opening is even written like a movie poster -- which are dotted throughout, giving weight to Ana's character as a film obsessive.

I can't say this is a happy book, although there's a resolution here which makes it a rewarding one. Walking on Dry Land is a compassionate, complex tale, ripe with politics, passion and family secrets.

Today marks my 10th birthday of writing about books online

Ten years ago today I posted my first ever book review online: Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning. Well, it wasn't so much as a "review" but a 100-word summary of how it made me feel.

This was in the days before Reading Matters became, well, Reading Matters. Back then I had a personal website (begun some time in 2000), which was essentially a blog before I knew what a blog was. As well as diary entries about my new life in London, I included short reviews of the books I had read. These weren't critiques as such, but aide mémoires, so if someone asked me what I'd been reading lately I didn't draw a blank.

And while today is not the 10th birthday of Reading Matters (that will happen in April 2014), it is where the seed to blog about books was born.

Reading Matters was officially started when I subscribed to Typepad in April 2004, but didn't really go into full swing until August 2005, when I posted 28 entries as opposed to my four or five per month. Up until that point, I had an audience of about three people (two of whom I knew) and attracted just 26 comments in a year!

Since my tentative beginnings I've written more than 1,600 posts, including almost 550 reviews, and you've left some 12,000 comments and come to visit more than 1 million times!

As ever, thanks for all your support -- and here's to the next 10 years!

The winners of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' are...

Thanks to everyone who entered my giveaway to win a copy of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front as part of World Book Night celebrations.

The ten lucky winners, selected at random, are as follows:

24, 32, 3, 25, 8, 16, 14, 17, 28, 22
Timestamp: 2011-03-06 12:45:22 UTC

That means Melissa, Pia, m, Tracey, Claire (Paperback Reader), (Diane) BibliophileByTheSea, Mae, Justin Hall, Coops and dovegreyreader will soon be receiving a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front.

I will be in touch shortly to arrange delivery of your special World Book Night editions!