Reading Journal 1 (May & June 26)
I have always been a reader, but as I'm sure many readers know, sometimes we forget to read and go through long periods of reading little or none. Or maybe that's just me. In any case, I am trying to kick my habit back in line again.
I like to have a few books on the go at a time, for different moods and places: generally, hardbacks for home, paperbacks out and about, something light for my phone for spare moments1, and some poetry when I feel like it. It's been working for me again, so I'll try to keep this system up as long as it works for me, the main benefits a book for every situation, so I'm can read widely and regularly.
I've been focusing on Ireland lately, rediscovering the richness of my home's literary history. Naturally, I'm starting with the books I already own.
Irish Sagas and Folk Tales by Eileen O'Faoláin is a retelling of some of Ireland greatest cycles, of Cú Chulainn and Fionn and others, in a tone aimed at younger readers. This doesn't dilute its richness, and the beauty of the tales shines strong in O'Failáin's hand. For a primer on the core myths of Ireland, this is a heartfelt place to start.
Exile by Pádraic Ó Conair is the author's only novel, translated from the Irish. It follows the mishaps of a down-and-out Irishman mostly in and around London at the turn of last century, surreal escapades peopled by bizarre characters, all with tone of tongue-in-cheek misery. A satire to rival Joyce and the finest modernists, I'm grateful to have been able to read the book in translation. Its composition in Irish is, sadly, a part of what holds it and other literature of Gaeilge back. Ó Conair wrote a vast oeuvre of works in Irish, a few of which have been translated to English and are on the block for me to read next. But perhaps this is further encouragement to learn the language of my home...
Killing Thatcher by Rory Caroll is described on the cover as being "as taut as a fictional thriller", and while I don't disagree, it perhaps has more in line with the blackest of tragedies. Subtitled The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, it tracks a history of the Troubles centred around bombing campaigns the Provisional IRA pursued across England in the 1970s and '80s, targeting increasingly provocative targets until finally going after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. We already know what happened in the end2, yet the tension is preserved remarkably well throughout, as we see events play out from the perspectives of those who lived them, the emotion and hardness of it breaking through the page in a way that is remarkably admirable for a book of its nature. Caroll truly is a gripping storyteller, winding a seemingly disjointed and chaotic whirlwind of events along a tight string toward a literal explosion of history, hatred, and humanity collapsing in upon one another. A fantastic read examining how events led to a situation when history turned on a moment.
Proved Innocent by Gerry Conlon is a sobering experience. It follows the author's life as he grows up in Belfast, moves to England, gets beaten and coerced by the English police into being framed for a bomb set off in a pub by the IRA, and spends nearly two decades in prison for something he did not do. Sobering indeed. Conlon describes a brutal penal life, from violent and abusive wardens to a legal system unfeeling toward his injustice, that is hard reading at times. I can only wonder how much he left out. But, a worthwhile read, showing to the world an example of the true horrors bureaucracy-laden imperialist states can inflict upon innocent others.
On the Blanket: The H-Block Story by Tim Pat Coogan was, if anything, an even harsher read than Gerry Conlon's memoir. A contemporary account3 of the protests undertaken by IRA prisoners at the Maze Prison (also called H-Block) in Belfast, around the height of the Troubles. It describes prison conditions in vicious detail, of the men who took the blanket and turned their cells in to a Hades of their own faecal making4. This is one to tell you just how horrific life can be made in a situation those men and women found themselves in. Grim but, in my eyes, enlightening reading, not only on my home history, but on people and politics and systems and structures and power and propaganda and belief. A time-capsule that remains readable in its relevance to humanity.
Outside of Ireland, I've been dipping into a few other places.
My Long Book for the moment is The Complete Chronicles of Conan, collecting most is not every Conan story Robert E. Howard wrote. About a third through, I'm enjoying it, and Howard's grizzly vision of weird and dark fantasy is as gripping as it no doubt was ninety years ago. A pre-Tolkien heavyweight, it's about time I got around to this, but in truth the bigotry in this one is... off putting. Aside from the understandable power fantasy and the ghastliness that comes along with horror writing, thick veins of racism and misogyny beat through these pages, detracting from Howard's writing and stripping him of any credibility his work might have as art. It's a feeling I have toward all artists whose work is poisoned by their hatred. Not to say it's not worth reading, for the great fantasy ideas on display, the occasional turn of phrase containing a stunning beauty, and the influence it has had over fantasy as a modern genre. Sometimes engaging with these classic works means bringing them to task, and treating them accordingly.
I picked up a copy of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as part of a charity shop deal, and revisited it, one of my favourites as a teenager. The prose is delicious and beautiful and simple, the story as straightforward as it is endlessly nuanced, the pinnacle of Hemingway's iceberg.
On phone I've been picking away at Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire in snippets, a fun enough story that scratches an itch for something just interesting and familiar enough to not be dull. Perfect for the odd moments I enjoy it in.
Looking forward, I have Pádraic Ó Conair's short stories, the memoir of a migrant from Galway to the Klondike gold rush, At-Swim Two Birds by Flann O'Brien, and after that I may tackle some philosophy. There's some Aristotle and Hume I have my eye on. Hopefully, I can keep up a regular habit now, and not let it slip as life tends to let it slip.
Naturally as an attempt to doomscroll less, it is mildly successful.↩
The bomb went off, Thatcher survived, and the bomber was eventually (and accidentally) caught.↩
Published in 1980, even before the hunger strikes proper.↩
There's a lot to explain here to those unaware of history in the north of Ireland. To sum up as well as I can - as a group called the Provisional Irish Republican Army began a terrorism campaign in the early 1970s in response to oppression by the British government and their continued political ownership of the part of Ireland that makes up Northern Ireland, those suspected of being part of the PIRA or other paramilitary groups began to be imprisoned on 'internment', effectively detention without charge for an unclear amount of time. At first they were mainly kept at Long Kesh, basically a series of huts in a compound outside of Belfast, before the construction of the purpose-built Maze Prison, nicknamed 'H-Block' for its shape. As prisoners began to be housed in H-Block, they lost some of the privileges they'd had in Long Kesh, such as wearing their own clothes, when the British government began treating them as criminal prisoners rather than political prisoners. The prisoners protested this by going 'on the blanket', refusing to wear prison clothing and instead donning blankets or towels or other rags, and as they suffered increasingly brutal treatment from guards, the situation deteriorated so far that the blanket men began a no-wash or 'dirty' protest, refusing to clean themselves or their cells and in fact daubing their cell was with their own human waste. Eventually, this evolved into a hunger strike, and only when the dead had piled up to a reasonable number were agreements reached and one of the vilest periods of that dark history came to an end. For the most part, none of this was actually new to the history of political and prison protests in Ireland, which had seen hunger strikers and blanket men before. Still, it's a particularly long footnote in that story indeed.↩