My Life in books: ‘I read exactly 345 pages, stopped... slammed it shut’
Author Mary O’Donnell: 'I adored 'The Mill on the Floss' by George Eliot but it also made me blub salt tears at the end.'
Award-winning writer Mary O’Donnell has been publishing novels, short stories, and poetry since 1990 and holds a PhD in creative writing from UCC.
Her latest novel , published by Époque Press, is out now. She lives in Co Kildare.
by Lyse Doucet; by Magda Szabó; Mary Costello’s just-published, amazingly perfect novel .
Almost anything by John Berger, but especially , which is really a series of imagined conversations with dead people that manages to be uplifting and sometimes downright funny.
by JRR Tolkien. I read exactly 345 pages then stopped and slammed it shut. Life was too short, I was 23 and wanted to be out and about without this massive tome in my lap.
Without doubt, three: Edna O’Brien’s , Brien Friel’s short story collection , and James Stephens’s .
by Benjamin Wood, about an unusual, often lonely young man who lives with his mother and earns a meagre living by using a horse-drawn cart to trawl for shrimp along the beach.
One day, along comes an American with an offer he simply can’t refuse, and the possibility of real money for his efforts. It’s a beautiful novel that moved me and by the end made me feel joyous.
I adored by George Eliot but it also made me blub salt tears at the end. The tension and attachment of sibling love is to the fore in this one, set against a background of industrialising rural England.
Frank O’Connor’s short story enriched my understanding of the anxieties and contradictions of war as his characters from both sides of the conflict move towards kindness and yet face the moral dilemma of what happens when one’s duty has to be fulfilled.
Too many to name, but one of them might be Simone de Beauvoir’s , which I read in 1976 and several times since.
I have three in mind: by Leopold Bloom, Rapunzel’s , but (more seriously) a monograph on the Cork-born artist Bridget Flannery who left us in 2024.
by Thomas Mann. To me, this remains the greatest European realist novel, written when Mann was a mere 26.
It charts the rise and fall of a rich merchant family in Lübeck against a background of growing democratisation, rising antisemitism, failed marriages, a hint of feminism, and the effects of genetic ‘weakness’.
was a stunning adaptation of the Hilary Mantel novel. Like the book, one could sink in and inhabit this place, this time, and those characters.
I absolutely loved Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell — the reserve, the intelligence, the self-possession that he reflected.
The Maynooth Bookshop and Kenny’s Bookshop online do it for me every time. They have everything and can get everything quickly.
An attempt at alphabetisation has largely failed, but at least the book genres are sectioned into poetry, fiction, short fiction, non-fiction, and my ‘pet’ books (the latter occupy three whole shelves and are not alphabetised).
Nothing. I’m an attentive reader and I might fall asleep if I drink or eat.
Toni Buddenbrook from , because she is a character whom life changes through bitter experience, and somehow survives and acquires wisdom.
BOOKS & MORE
Check out our Books Hub where you will find the latest news, reviews, features, opinions and analysis on all things books from the Irish Examiner's team of specialist writers, columnists and contributors.
