What book are you reading atm?? CHAPTER TWO

That Place We Call Home: A Journey Through the Place Names of Ireland by John Creedon

An interesting little book about how we got some of our place names in Ireland from such influences as the Vikings, Norman's, British, etc.

He did yes, Creedons' Atlas of Ireland.

’A Melon for Ecstasy’ by John Fortune & John Wells. An epistolary story about a man who is romantically interested in trees.

Funny enough tale, lots of letters, newspaper clippings, council meetings and outlandish situations. But some of the scenarios have, really, not dated well at all.

Latest reads:

Wellness by Nathan Hill: One of those big Johnathan Franzen type novels about all kinds of everything and contemporary American life, as seen through the eyes of a couple, Jack & Elizabeth, struggling their way through their ostensibly successful upper middle-class life. We see their formative years, the flushes of first romance and idealism and the eventual bone crushing, vitality crushing realities of ordinary life: getting a job, finding somewhere to live, getting older, having a child, losing the spark. Tbh, the book is a bit of a downer, but it is also pretty good, borderline great even. It's particularly good at evoking the bewildered state we're all in currently - deluged by information and data, unable to know what's objective reality, the incessant demands of capital, how every last moment of our lives is being increasingly technologized and we're all so fcking estranged from each other: God help us! There's a thirty-page segment of the book dealing with Jack's father's descent into Internet addiction that's absolutely amazing in its plausibility and terrifying in its matter of factness about the cold logical mechanics behind the attention economy. One of the better contemporary novels I've read in a good long while.

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan: A bit of a curious mix of a whodunnit and a kitchen sink type warts and portrayal of a damaged family in damaged circumstances. The heart of the novel about the fallout from a teenage pregnancy on a family in eighties Ireland is very well done and emotionally devastating. She's obviously a good writer - with nice poetic touches, a deep empathy for her characters and a healthy dose of realistic cynicism, but the framing narrative of a mystery that needs solving feels a bit tacked on and superfluous. The novel as a whole is a bit padded out, but pretty good as an exploration of warped family dynamics.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar - a suicidal alcoholic Iranian American poet decides to make something of his life by engaging on a project about the concept of Martyrdom, as an attempt to deal with the trauma of losing his mother in a plane crash at a young age… Some of this I liked. The descriptions of being completely down and out and at your wit’s end felt painfully real and the fact that the author is coming from a totally different frame of reference and historical background gives the novel a unique flavouring to what I'd usually read: he's a hyper literate culturally informed urbanite, but one whose head filled with the myths and legends of Iran and Islam. But, overall, the whole narrative was a bit half-baked and the central conceit of the thing wasn't fleshed out enough for me to sufficiently care enough.

The Years by Annie Ernaux - Annie Ernaux is fcking amazing. Like all of her stuff that I have read, this book - you couldn't really call it a memoir or a novel - is part biography, part social history. Basically, an account of growing up in France from the 1940's to roughly the modern day. It's at once highly subjective - focusing a lot on the direct sensory experience of things: the taste, the look, the smell of the times - and also at the same time purposely depersonalised - using the direct experience of one individual as representative of the wider social effects and changes of a given time on a society as whole. Ernaux is so amazing because she has this ability to be simultaneously inside and outside of things at once. She can describe how something felt with such unvarnished specificity that you'll wince reading it and yet she’ll always have this overall authorial position of seeing things from a sky-high perspective and how everything, no matter how individual and personal, fits into the wider maelstrom of social forces and change, that are usually inexplicable to those living through it all. And not one sentence that she writes doesn't ring true. I could go on, but these little reviews are already pretty indulgent as it is - I simply can't recommend her enough.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes - I don't usually read sci-fi. But this had got some pretty alright reviews, so I thought I'd give it a go. Long story short - an exploration of what it means to be human etc, etc - based around a story about a trip to an asteroid that may or may not contain the secrets to the origin of life. This one is a rare one for me: a did not finish. I usually plod on, no matter what. But I got about halfway through this and I realised I was reading page after page and not remotely giving a shyte about the nitty gritty details about how to prepare for interstellar travel or the intricates of molecular life, written in pretty leaden prose - so I just gave up. Some sci-fi fans might love it, but it just wasn't for me.

@Arghus

Very appreciative of the effort put into these reviews. Thank you.

It takes guts and being truly awake (or awakening) to pull the plug on a book or a film. Thankfully another plus of getting older. Discernment increases.

Watched the Northman until 20 minutes from the end and realised it wasn't post midnight fatigue but boredom I was feeling. I líoned the bearnaí and caught some Zs.

Dune, it's easier to read than I thought but I can tell there is going to be a lot to digest.

Also re-read Starter for Ten by David Nicholls, In Cold Blood by Capote and Brighton Rock by Graham Greene because......well, why not. Nicholls just nails college life, feeling out of your depth and/or league and the big decisions in student life, like what albums, posters and books to have in your room to impress the girl you fancy. Hilarious.

86 years after publication and 20 years after first reading it, Pinkie in Brighton Rock still scares the **** out of me!

I'm about 75% into Year of the Locust - around 600 pages.
It started well but has descended into an absolute pile of unbelievable shite!
Did he have a stroke during the writing?

I couldn't see what the fuss was about with I am Pilgrim either. I wouldn't be that fussy but my God, that was poor writing.

Ran into bad guy, beat him up, onto next bad guy, killed him, rinse and repeat

The Farseer trilogy was my introduction to her. Picked up Assassin's Apprentice for something like 1 or 2 euro on Book Depository and was hooked. The Liveship Trilogy will be my second outing.

I'm currently reading Habitat by Caitriona Shine. It's reminding me a bit of Stephen King's original treatment for Under the Dome, only not as interesting. Taking too long to get going, imo.

After that it's The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. Have very mixed feelings about this, I couldn't finish Skippy Dies so I'm really hoping his writing has improved since then.

Im reading nothing until I get proper reading glasses , but I’m after ordering an ‘acceptable’ copy of Karl Spindlers book , he was the captain of the SS Libeau ( disguised as the Aud in 1916 . He scuttled it in Cork harbour and moved to the US after wwi

You sell it better than GoodReads.

She's a pain, I'd love to give her slap and throw her father overboard Vivacia 🤣

I gave up on No one is talking about this, wouldn't be a fan of stream of consciousness type stuff. Might try it again going on what you said Arghus as it seems to be worth sticking with it.

Finished Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent, really enjoyed it. She does a good job in making a character who you are obviously meant to hate at the start, quite sympathetic as the story goes on.

About two thirds through April in Spain by John Banville. Love the Quirke series of books and this is the best yet. He has finally married and "settled down". The writing about mundane married life stuff, about a guy who thought he never would get married, is just very touching and funny.

Palace of Shadows Ray Celestin

Read one of his other books and enjoyed it. Just started this one.

Replay by Ken Grimwood; 100 or so pages left. Story of a man who dies young but wakes up many years before hand and repeats that cycle over and over again.

It was released in 1986. Looking forward to seeing how he ends the story. Surprised it’s never being made into a movie or tv series.

I'd disagree with your point on Claire Keegan & mid-1980s. Bear in mind the timing, 1979 a million people are in the Phoenix Park to see the pope. Mid-1980s nearly everyone in Ireland is still attending Mass every week. Maybe the institutions themselves ( the industrial schools and magdalene laundaries and so on would have had much greater numbers in the 1970s or 1960s, thats probably true).

But there is also the symbolism of the timing - you'd probably agree with me that the biggest social change in our lifetimes took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s (I'd be roughly the same age, whatever that is 😊). Thats when the country first became richer, when the troubles eased off, when the church scandals really broke with a vengeance and when the country became more liberal and outward looking.

The mid-1980s was the time of the Kerry babies, of Ann Lovett in the grotto in Granard - which is far more outlandish than what happens in this book and remains absolutely shocking to me today.

The point of this book for me - a book that condemns the church institutions for children is completely in tune with how this country currently thinks - you wont find many people who will disagree with that point of view. However I think the point of this book is to project people back to when it would not have been a mainstream view at all.

The comparison I'd make is with Berlin in the late 1980s just before the wall came down. The country was still in the icy grip of the Church/ State depending on which country you are talking about and it was a brave person at that point who would go against the flow. We can all be brave after the event. Somebody has to be the first to do it. The mid-1980s was the tipping point; when it was all about to change in a big way.

I read Small Things Like these a few weeks back, and read So Late in the Day over the weekend. There is no doubting she is a brilliant writer - her sentences are so well crafted. Never too dense, never too wordy, beautifully written and worth re-reading. By far my favourite Irish writer at the moment.

The theme of the second book - I wondered the same as the first - is she just picking easy targets here. With the me-too movement and so on, there is a very wide discourse in society about gender. Again, she has a subtle take on it; but one which cuts to the heart of the issue in a way in which a lot of the sensationalist social media discourse absolutely does not do. People were giving out on goodreads that the book was too short. For me a good book is one that stays with you. The anecdote (memory) within this about the mother/ pancakes (read it) has so much depth, and so many layers to it, it really hits home.