No 477 Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor Book 10 of #20booksofsummer20
Ghost light. An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own plays Joseph O’Connor’s novel is teeming with ghosts, both imagined and real. Ghost Light, which was published before his critically acclaimed Shadowplay, also focuses on the…
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No 478 Cooked by Michael Pollan Book 9 of #20booksofsummer20
Michael Pollan’s Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is a hard book to categorise. It is not a cookbook, although it contains recipes and Pollan is not a chef, although the book details his cooking exploits. Cooked is a fascinating look at how we approach the food we eat and encompasses economics, history, philosophy, anthropology…
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No 479 The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing Book 8 of #20booksofsummer20
Alcohol has had a starring role in the creative lives of some of the world’s most famous authors. In an essay entitled Alcohol and Poetry Lewis Hyde noted that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely William Faulker, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. The…
June Miscellany
No 480 Portia Coughlan by Marina Carr Book 7 of #20booksofsummer20
I saw the original production of Portia Coughlan at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in 1996 and was mesmerised. I had never seen anything like it. That production, starring Derbhle Crotty and Bronagh Gallagher, transferred to the Royal Court in London but the play wasn’t staged again for nearly 20 years, before a new production…
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Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss Book 6 of #20booksofsummer20
Tuesday Nights in 1980 encapsulates two things I love in a book – a New York setting and a story about the art world. Prentiss’s debut novel asks big questions about talent and purpose – what do we do, when we can no longer do the thing the we define ourselves by? The novel begins…
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No 481 Espedair Street by Iain Banks Book 5 of #20booksofsummer
It’s been a log time since I’ve read any Iain Banks, not since I devoured The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Complicity in my early 20’s. His fourth book feels like a departure from his earlier, more experimental novels. Espedair Street tells the story of the Danny Weir, former bass guitarist with the fictional…
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No 482 Hotel by Arthur Hailey Book 4 of #20booksofsummer20
It’s probably hard to understand the cultural significance of Arthur Hailey in the 1960’s. His big, block-busting novels were best-sellers and he was the undisputed king of the pae-turning commercial thriller, captivating readers around the world with his movie-worthy plots. Hotel did in fact became a highly successful TV show in the ’80s produced by…
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Turbulence by David Szalay Book 3 of #20booksofsummer20
I am a real sucker for a book of linked stories so Turbulence by David Szalay sounded right up my street. The novel, if it even is that, is structured as 12 linked stories, each of them presenting a brief view into the life of a solitary air traveller. As the characters brush past one…
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