2019: Projected Reading List

2019 will be a great year. Self can feel it in her bones.

First, she’ll start the year trying to read Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. If she makes it through just three or four of the series, she’ll be happy.

It will be the year she gets back to reading Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal.

She’s going to try re-reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino.

Then she’s going to work her way through The Guardian’s Best Books of 2018 list. Which includes:

Almost everything Sarah Waters recommends: National Service, by Richard Vinen; In Our Mad and Furious City, by Guy Gunaratne; The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter; The Vet’s Daughter, a 1959 novel by Barbara Comyn; Swann’s Way by Proust; and (a re-read of) Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy.

Self’s reading list in 2019 will still lean heavy towards fiction. Here’s a partial list from The Guardian’s Best Books of 2018. All the authors are new to self, except for Liz Nugent and Pat Barker.

FICTION:

Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss; Milkman, by Anna Burns; The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker; Melmoth, by Sarah Perry; Red Birds, by Mohammed Hanif; Friday Black, by Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; West, by Carys Davies; Sight, by Jessie Greengrass; Everything Under, by Daisy Johnson; There There by Tommy Orange; Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday; Brother, by Canadian David Chariandy; All the Lives We Never Lived, by Anuradha Roy; Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk; Normal People, by Sally Rooney; The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Hermes Gowar; Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan; The Western Wind, by Samantha Harvey; Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, by Andrew Miller; Painter to the King, by Amy Sackville; Murmur, by Will Eaves.

CRIME:

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton; The Stranger Diaries, by Elly Griffiths; November Road, by Lou Berney; Brothers in Blood, by Amer Anwar; Lullaby by Leila Slimani; Skin Deep, by Liz Nugent (who I’ve actually met); Fear, by Dirk Kurbjuweit; London Rules, by Mick Herron; Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh; Tombland by CJ Sansom; The House on Vesper Sands, by Paraic O’Donnell, and The Vogue, by Eoin McNamee.

Many, many more.

Stay tuned.

Poetry Wednesday: From Thomas McCarthy’s MERCHANT PRINCE (Anvil Press: London, 2005)

He Considers His Great Luck, 1812

(for Catherine)

The moment that is lost is hardly ever found again,
As this minute, as the century.
Your love when I found it there was a brief day
For the asking, but you and your Sisters
and the Ursulines home from Havre
Might easily have snatched you away again —

Most utterly loved woman, most Callanan-like.

Out of this harbor the unlicensed ships sail.
The wind catches them, the fingers of heaven.
Even the most skilled Master can only protect
But not bring home cinnamon, not profit.

One moment in my life I did sail beyond Roche’s Point
So that you might catch my sail, my merchant eye.

I have traded off your love all my life —
The way a Bishop, the way a good Prince ventures forth.

Thomas McCarthy was born in Co. Waterford and educated at University College, Cork. He has published six collections of poetry, two novels and a memoir.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Poetry Friday: Omagh Freezes

by Aine MacAodha, from her collection Landscape of Self (Belfast: Lapwing, 2015)

It was early November
I remember because of
How cold it was
A mini ice age it was said.
15 below zero; small towns
In the north stood still
Phone lines came down
From the weight of frost and snow
Burst pipes in the hundreds
And the drains unable to cope
Backed up.
I slid on the ice; tore ligaments
In my arm when I was helped up.
I feel the aches again as winter
Loiters like a threat.
Bones shudder under skin
A warning of another ice age to come.
It was the talk of the town all winter season
From the post office in market street
To the butchers in campsite
It was something different to talk about I suppose.

Aine MacAodha is from Omagh in County Tyrone.

Poetry Wednesday: Another From Tom MacIntyre

from the poem Return Visit (in the collection I Bailed Out at Ardee, which I discovered in a bookshelf in my unit at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig)

There’s a sign,
you that’s one for signs,

you’ve climbed the mountain,
gone into the wood
to touch the stones —

the stones can’t be found.

Scan the view.
Weigh the lean
mid-winter air.

That sapper’s mark
has its eye on me.

I stand there years,

then know-nothing,

Poetry Tuesday: Tom MacIntyre

After hours and hours of straight writing, self takes a break by perusing her cottage’s bookshelves for poetry collections.

She finds a collection called I Bailed Out at Ardee (Dedalus), by Tom MacIntyre.

Excerpt from Father

My shoulder knows his coffin
best of all, I was
the one who wasn’t there.

Tom MacIntyre was born in Cavan.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Detective Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy of the Dublin Murder Squad, p. 91

We had been looking for the thing they had done wrong. Now we were looking for the thing that they could never have guessed they were doing wrong.

— Broken Harbour, by Tana French

 

Fifth From the Annaghmakerrig Book: Anne Haverty

I used to be quite a normal fellow.

— from One Day As a Tiger by Anne Haverty

Three to Add to the Reading List

The first book is one which self initially approached with skepticism because the publisher is an academic press (Oxford) and she still remembers how they mangled a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi and doesn’t think she has forgiven them yet.

But anyhoo, there’s a new biography of Angela Carter (and gives cause to the 13 March 2017 New Yorker to share the interesting fact that she has been “pigeonholed as a white witch”) and self wants to give The Invention of Angela Carter, by Edmund Gordon, a go.

The next two books she’s adding to her reading list are from the Briefly Noted section (other books in the Briefly Noted section: The Schooldays of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee, and A Book of American Martyrs, by Joyce Carol Oates): a biography called, simply, Jonathan Swift, by John Stubbs, and This Close to Happy, Daphne Merkin’s “memoir of struggling with depression.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

#amreadingpoetry: Justin Quinn

Flood-Plains

There are rushes and loess
round trees in all the boskets
worked into large brown baskets
with care and quick finesse

by the swirling grand excess
that charged down from the Beskyds.
The baked mud breaks like biscuits
beneath the emptiness.

I’ll marry thee
with a rush ring then
and faithfull be

till that moist sliver
rises agayne
to a raging river.

— Justin Quinn, from his collection Waves and Trees (The Gallery Press, Ireland)

#amreading: from ANNAGHMAKERRIG, Book # 7, Unit # 1, Tyrone Guthrie

Salt, Chapter 1, by Claire Keegan

I married Billy Fennell in a cold, lambing season . . . Nobody came to our wedding.