My life in books: 'I’ve written lots since but haven’t yet got around to growing up'
Mick Clifford read 'Jiving at the Crossroads' by John Waters when he was thinking of trying to get into journalism. File picture: Moya Nolan
Mick Clifford is an award-winning investigative journalist and author.
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is a forensic and compelling look at precisely what Donald Trump has been at since he was re-elected. The detail is jaw-dropping and scary as hell; the reporting first-class.
by Eoin McNamee. A collection of his short stories, which are written with a precise, economic prose and create worlds that are full of tension and well-drawn characters.
is my favourite of Raymond Carver’s collections of short stories.
He wrote about life on the margins, always with humour, usually leaving much unsaid which is the hallmark of a great writer.
by George Packer is a detailed study of the Iraq War and all that led to it.
Packer is one of the top American non-fiction writers, but this was an exhaustive work. I quit before exhaustion set in.
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I read by John Waters when I was thinking of trying to get into journalism.
I was in my late 20s, abroad, working from the neck down and didn’t know anything about, or anybody in, journalism.
Waters wrote from the outside and he created a world that was compelling. I loved it and decided that when I grew up I wanted to write. I’ve written lots since but haven’t yet got around to growing up.
Anything by Elmore Leonard: With characters that you can’t forget and dialogue that sparks off the page.
I always have the impression that Leonard was smiling as he wrote, enjoying himself, creating his world of cool and crazy.
by Joan Didion: A master of the essay and observing American life through the decades, this meditation of personal loss with the sudden death of her husband and dealing with her daughter’s critical illness saw her stripped of her customary detachment.
by Hunter S Thompson: Before this I thought the only prose that dived deep into the imagination was fiction.
He was a crazy man with narcissistic traits and addiction problems but he wrote like a dream.
by Gene Kerrigan and Derek Dunne about the Sallins mail train robbery, a paranoid government, corrupt police, and incurious judiciary taught me that you can never trust authority.
You must work your way back from distrust and if authority is found deserved, then you can trust them.
The great Irish novel about changes in the last 25 years in this country. I’m in the market, but I’m not sure that the market is in me.
by Claire Keegan: The subject matter of cruelty towards those thrust beyond society’s boundaries of acceptability should be mandatory reading for everybody.
by Cormac McCarthy was an exceptional book but the film probably outdid it.
McCarthy’s precise sparse prose are cinematic by nature but some adaptations like simply didn’t hit the spot. No Country did.
Quirke’s in Caherciveen is a den of the unexpected. And while you’re looking Colman Quirke might sidle up with something you hadn’t even thought about.
Chaos. They keep adding up and whenever I try to spring-clean I find I can’t let go of anything.
Cáca milis.
Maurice Hearne from Kevin Barry’s . A washed-up dealer from Cork weighed down with “issues”.
I can nearly see him walking over Patrick’s Bridge, nodding at Father Matthew, wondering where he might have gone wrong.
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