Down but not out

The Bee Sting - Paul Murray: I have to say I really enjoyed this book. Yes it was long and the writing wasn't especially special but the story telling was great and that was the books strong point. Like others I would not described this as a funny book though there were one or two funny moments. And after brilliantly building the tension through the final 100 pages or so I found the inconclusive ending to be quite a letdown. Still a great book all the same and I'll definitely be revisiting Skippy Dies in light of it.

Prophet Song - Paul Lynch: Last years Booker Prize winner, it only took a few pages to see why the judges favoured this book over the other nominees. The Bee Sting is good but this is on another level entirely. The writing is superb and the story - a dystopian nightmare on a par with McCarthy's The Road - draws you in slowly as one by one, the facets of everyday life are stripped away by tyranny. And setting it in Dublin where I grew up, where the places, people and things are all too familiar, only made it all the more grim. If nothing else this book should be a reminder of the relative luxury of living in a democracy however imperfect it might be.

Antarctica - Claire Keegan: Been laid up the past few weeks with a cold and, not being able to do much else, I've been busy with my reading list. And the latest read, the first of Keegan's short story collections, though far short of her best work is nonetheless an interesting mix of themes, characters and settings.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John le Carré: I took a break from some longer reads during the few days without power and among other things I read this, the third of le Carré's novels to feature George Smiley, though in this one he is mostly lurking in the shadows. As mentioned in HJ's thread it's one I've read before though that was many years ago and I remembered next to nothing of the plot. It's a good read but le Carré's take on the Cold War-era espionage thriller won't be to everyone's taste as his characters exist in a very grim and murky world very much removed from the glitz and glamour of the likes of Mr Bond!

Children of Men - P.D. James: The second of two books by James frequently mentioned elsewhere in the forum, the premise for this dystopian tale is a good one - namely the demise of humanity, not through some cataclysmic event, but rather, slowly and inexorably, as a result of infertility. And many of the themes in the book - migrants, gender, corrupt and dysfunctional political institutions - are very prescient in today's troubled world. However, the descriptive passages go on a bit too much for my liking, interrupting the flow of the book, and the love story is a tired old trope which adds nothing; if anything, it rather takes from the novel in it's predictability. Not a bad book but it could have been so much more if the storytelling had been better.

A Man in Love - Karl Ove Knaussgaard: The second installment of Knausgaard's six volume autofiction series Min Kamp (My Struggle), I got on a lot better with this one than the first, perhaps because I had an inkling of what to expect. At 650 pages with no chapters and only occasional line breaks, the granular detail, the focus on the banal, peppered with the authors philosophical musings, won't be everyone's cup of tea but I found it strangely compelling.

Unsettled - Rosaleen McDonagh: This months book club choice, a short piece of autobiography, is a very frank account of the authors life as an Irish Traveller living with a disability. It wasn't a book I was expecting much from but it packs quite a punch and is a damning indictment of the Irish State in its failure to care for those on the margins of society.

Heroic Failure - Fintan O'Toole: Another quick read while I convalesce. Whereas the last book I read on Brexit, Tony Connelly's Brexit and Ireland, was forensic and technical Heroic Failure goes in the other direction entirely. Fintan paints his picture with very broad brush strokes, taking in everything from Agincourt to The Italian Job and The Sex Pistols, with perhaps a bit too much analogy and metaphor. Not a bad book by any means but again it hasn't quite scratched that Brexit itch. By all accounts Tim Shipman has written the definitive story of Brexit so that's where I'm off to next for my Brexit fix.

Ducks, Newburyport - Lucy Ellmann: I had two false starts before I got into this book and I'm so glad I persisted with it because I think it's nothing short of a masterpiece. Almost a thousand pages of continuous internal monologue, briefly interrupted here and there by a parallel narrative, reading it one is reminded of Penelope, the last episode of Ulysses, where the thoughts of Molly Bloom come to life. And that's an interesting comparison given Lucy's father is Richard Ellmann who wrote the celebrated literary biography of James Joyce, and one of the reasons the book caught my eye. Set during Trumps first term in office the central character muses on everything around her - family, friends, neighbours, work, school, love, loss, the news, the environment, gun crime, and a host of other issues brought about by this most mendacious of presidencies. (One can only wonder what she's thinking second time around!) Ducks, Newburyport won't be for everyone, especially because of a particular literary device the author uses throughout the book which some readers may find off-putting. But like McCabe's Poguemahone - even more so, in fact - there's a rhythm to this book and once you pick up on it it'll whisk you along all the way to the end.

I'm a week late wrapping up another year of reading but it couldn't be helped. I read 42 books this time around and a lot of very good books at that. The Secret History, A Ghost in the Throat, They All Love Jack, Normal People, Prophet Song and Ducks, Newburyport were all great reads but Foster is my top pick just for the way that Keegan manages to convey so much with so few words. Worst book was Lucky Jim given it's lauded as one of the funniest books ever written but is nothing of the sort and in the main is a very unremarkable yarn. And special mention to For God's Sake: The Hidden Life of Irish Nuns for giving me an insight I never expected to get.

In the year ahead I'm determined to tackle Joyce which I failed to do this past twelve months, I have to get back into Wolf Hall which is patiently waiting for my return, and I'd also like to tackle some more non-fiction if I can.

The Spinning Heart - Donal Ryan: While I'm not generally a fan of multiple narrators this short work, Ryan's first published novel which tells of the aftermath of the 2009 financial crash through the voices of various people in a rural Irish town, was still a good read and established a style that I've become familiar with in his later novels.