I haven't updated the list of books I've read since a post in August 2021. Here's my reading list for the period September 2021 to December 2022.
Fiction
Barnes, Julian: Levels of Life
Barrett, Colin: Homesickness
Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths
Erskine, Wendy: Dance Move
Ishiguro, Kazuo: Klara and the Sun
Keegan, Clare: Small Things Like These
Magee, Audrey: The Colony
Mansfield, Katherine: Selected
Stories
Mitchell, David: The thousand autumns of Jacob De Zoet
Murnane, Gerald: The Plains
Rooney, Sally: Beautiful World, Where Are You
Saramago, José: Blindness
Shafak, Elif: Three daughters of Eve
Tóibín, Colm: The Testament of Mary
Woolf, Virgina / Emre, Merve: The annotated Mrs Dalloway
My top three would be the books by Magee, Mitchell, and Saramago, with honorable mentions for Ishiguro and Tóibín. I didn't get on at all with the book by Murnane, simply finding it dull. The book by Sally Rooney was good, she writes well, but I really don't understand what all the hype is about. The narrator's voice in Rachel Cusk's 'Second Place' got on my nerves a bit, but thinking about it afterwards I sense that was deliberate on Cusk's part and I've resolved to read the book again.
I also read a lot of non-fiction and particularly enjoyed the personal history 'We Don't Know Ourselves' by Fintan O'Toole. His Ireland is also my Ireland, and unfortunately it includes the perverted and sexually abusive Christian Brother we both encountered in Colaiste Chaoimhin, me six years after him.
Poetry Collections
Caldwell, Anne: Alice and the North
Ducker, Christy: Skipper
Mahon, Derek: New Selected Poems
Ní Ghríofa, Doireann: Lies
Ní Ghríofa, Doireann: To Star the Dark
These are all great but the collection by Caldwell was particularly illuminating, showing me possibilities that I hadn't imagined before in a themed sequence of prose poems.
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