It’s that time again! March is coming, my favourite month in my blogging calendar, because it’s Reading Ireland Month – will you be joining us?

Ah, gwan, ya will!

By now you’ll know that we never stop banging on about Ireland and its hefty cultural punch. Four Nobel Prize winners; five Booker Prize winners; some world dominating musicians; a host of Oscar winners (with Saoirse Ronan and Martin McDonagh nominated for this year’s awards) and a leading action hero from Ballymena.

We have the best pint in the world and the most stunning coastline – you could even say it’s in a galaxy far, far away.

Last year we hosted over 100 posts on all things relating to Irish culture. Books, food, travel, movies, theatre and favourite bookshops – your enthusiasm was boundless and so was your reading.

To celebrate the wealth and breadth and general awesomeness of Irish cultural life, I will be co-hosting a month long celebration of all things Irish, with my partner in crime Raging Fluff.

Reading Ireland Month (or The Begorrathon as it is affectionately known) will feature book and film reviews, poems, music, interviews, giveaways and much, much more.

We’d love for you to join us!

You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.

–George Bernard Shaw

Grab our new badge and put it in your sidebar and get planning your Ireland themed reading or viewing. Like our Facebook page here and then between 1 and 31 March, post as much as you like about any aspect of Irish literature and culture – anything at all!

Read this year’s One City One Book choice The Long Gaze Back, edited by Sinead Gleeson. Post your wheaten bread recipe. Make a list of your favourite Irish books or movies. Eat a packet of Tayto crisps. Listen to The Cranberries and marvel at the brilliance of the much-missed Dolores O’Riordan. Read a novel by Sebastian Barry – the new Irish Laureate for Literature.

Watch Star Wars: The Last Jedi and marvel at our countryside. Read some of last year’s award winning new fiction from Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends) and June Caldwell (Room Little Darker). If you’re feeling brave, read Ulysses. Treat yourself to a binge watch of the latest hit comedy Derry Girls.

The options are endless!

 

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We’re not big on rules so the ones we have are pretty straightforward:

• Put a link to your post on our Facebook page and we’ll be sure to share it
• Use the linky on the Master Post to share your own posts with everyone else
• Join the craic on Facebook
• Check out the list of 100 Irish Novels and 100 Novels by Irish Women Writers on 746 Books blog in case you need some help choosing a book

Don’t forget to tweet about your post using the hashtags #readireland18 or #begorrathon18

We can’t wait to hear what you are planning. Have you any books or movies lined up? Any new authors or old favourites you might visit during March?

Sure, it’ll be a bit of craic….

 Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies’ heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they re-established literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

Thomas Cahill

 

Ireland Month The 746 #readireland18 #thebegorrathon18 irish literature reading challenge