World Book Day: Irish authors and others pick their favourite reads
World Book Day takes place on Thursday, March 3.
So many to choose from, but my favourite Irish read at this very moment is Poetry, Memory And The Party by Tom McCarthy. It offers a deep and insightful experience into a world so familiar to me.
Beyond Ireland’s shores the water is deep and wide – but my current favourite book at bedtime is A Change In The Weather by Ron Kolm. Ten years ago in Austria, I lucked into a reading presented by Ron. What an incredible introduction to the work of this most artistic, anarchic, humorous, radical and poetic gentle soul.
- Cónal Creedon’s Pancho and Lefty Ride Again is published by Irishtown Press.
I’ll go pretentious with this one. James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s important to me that as many people as possible know that I’ve read it, and indeed wrote about it, in a very well-regarded 2006 UCC dissertation. Absolute page-turner.
My second choice is another Odyssean masterpiece. Alan Partridge – Nomad by Steve Coogan. Quite simply the best comedy writing I’ve ever read. “I run towards discomfort like a man who has strapped truth explosives to his body and made his peace with God.” Amen.
Cú Chulainn of Eirú is a re-telling of the Cú Chulainn story. It’s a translation by Richard Roche and Derek Fennell. I’d never been able to enjoy any published Cú Chulainn fables. The medieval ones don’t make any sense. The nineteenth-century ones are twee. But Roche and Fennell’s one is brilliant.
The book that delighted me over the last few years is Isabella Tree’s Wilding. She’s from a posh estate in East Sussex. Herself and her husband realised the oak trees, which were always the symbol of their power, were dying because of modern farming methods so they set about re-wilding this vast estate, letting the nettles, ragwort and brambles go wild. Their neighbours were horrified.
Irish: In John Banville’s The Newton Letter, a historian trying to finish a book hires a cottage for the summer and becomes snared in local life. But trying to summarise a Banville novel is like trying to bottle whispers. For sheer imaginative intellect and crafting beautiful sentences, pushing beyond the poetic into the realms of sorcery, he sets the bar.
International: In Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, a wealthy married man travels to a remote mountain town and carries on a casual affair with a geisha. Kawabata's stories churn beneath seemingly still surfaces. It is a deeply sad novel about the beauty and treachery of nature, the impermanence of love and the illusions that we fill ourselves with in order to survive.
I always think of Patrick McCabe’s The Dead School as a turning point in the way I viewed writing. The way he uses words and conjures up humour amidst the blackest of tales, just blew me away. He is a master storyteller and one of our finest writers.
Ben Bradlee’s autobiography walks us through Bradlee’s fascinating and colourful life. First, his close friendship with JFK and then, as editor of the newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal, his involvement in the fall of Richard Nixon. Bradlee was there from the beginning as the story unfolded and eventually ended with the United States president resigning in shame.
In Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, I love how O’Brien, a scholar of old and modern Irish, could take an ironic look at the self-satisfied nationalist narrative of the time. He brought a wicked wit to a subject that in those days was invariably treated with reverence. It is hilarious.
My present favourite is called Transit by Anna Seghers. It’s a Kafkaesque account of the tribulations of wartime refugees fleeing the Nazis. Seghers was both Jewish and Communist and thereby doubly condemned by the Nazis.
Other Words For Smoke by Sarah Maria Griffin is a gorgeous work of Irish fantasy that blends together the present and the past, the public and the private. It’s about love and loss and the history that still weighs upon Irish women. It does what all good works of fantasy do, which is make you think about the present moment in a new light.
Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro will make you reconsider what it means to be alive. I wasn’t able to put it down once I started, and I still think about it frequently. The scope of the book is small, just a companion robot and her owner, which allows it to tackle huge concepts such as love and humanity.
- Catherine Prasifka’s novel None of This is Serious (Canongate) will be out in April.
I love Roddy Doyle’s The Van. I love the way he writes phonetically, the way people speak. My mother gave it to me when I was still living at home. It’s so funny.
My favourite author is Stephen King and my favourite book of his is The Stand, which is, eerily enough, about a post-apocalyptic man-made virus that spreads. His ability to draw you in and build characters is amazing. You almost build a relationship with them.
- Chris Kent is performing at Dublin’s Vicar Street, Friday, March 11.
I first read The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien when I was a teenager and was bowled over by its surreal otherworld. It sat well with the science fiction I was reading back then. It was also hilarious. Every time I’ve read it since, some new aspect or idea has emerged, as if the story itself is a living, breathing, developing thing.
Lauren Groff’s Matrix is imaginative and gloriously written. It is, in its own way, as wild a tale as The Third Policeman. The cloistered life of a 12th-century mystic nun might not seem the most promising pitch but this story builds into a widescreen wonder, full of memorable characters and beautiful ideas.
Emma Donoghue’s Room is gripping. It’s about something heinous and incredibly dark and the worst part of humanity, almost reminiscent of the Josef Fritzl case. The way it’s written you get so invested in the story of the girl who’s kept captive and Jack, her son. You’re rooting for them throughout, hoping for them to escape. It’s fascinating.
My mother gave me The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I loved its imagery and description of India, and the insights it provides of the country. It’s almost like a myth – the saga of a family, with all its twists and turns, inherited traumas, and these fraternal twins whose lives are turned upside-down.
Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan. Just wow wow wow. We've all got a bit of desperation in us, and this book identified it with such razor-sharp precision, it gave me goosebumps.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory is by the creator of BoJack Horseman, my favourite TV show, and is full of weird, funny and profound stories of love. Each one is equal parts absurd and sincere, and I reread any time I need a reminder of the meaningfulness that can be found in other people.
- Trouble: A Memoir by Marise Gaughan is published by Monoray on April 7
