Patricia’s Blog
Reading Mary Lavin’s story ‘In the Middle of the Fields’ in the recent anthology of Irish Women Writers The Long Gaze Back, I was reminded of a visit to East Walpole on the outskirts of Boston several years ago. I had travelled along Washington Street which seemed to extend forever in straight lines south-east of the…
Read MoreConcord, Massachusetts, the birth place of Henry David Thoreau, is a very civilised place these days. When I travelled there from Boston, I had to go to the nearby Walden Pond, the place Thoreau made famous and where he lived the simple life in a cabin for two years. His essay, Walking (1862), is one of…
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Anna Browne is 97 years old. She was one of the compilers of the Cathal Brugha Street publication All In The Cooking for the college’s Domestic Science students almost 70 years ago. Anna writes the Foreword to the delightful reissue of the book by O’Brien Press. Could this be Ireland’s very first cookery book? And not…
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Recently I took a notion that I would like to re-read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I searched high up and low down but couldn’t find it on my shelves, so I dropped into Easons where I was able to buy it for three euros, all 800 pages of it. And off I set again, starting with that…
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I haven’t yet read Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz – only the first chapter that you can read on BBB 4 web site and where you can also hear an interview with the author herself. It was my Kindle e-book reader that first got me into reading first chapters. Reading first chapters for free became my favourite Kindle…
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They’re a fussy lot in our Book Club but each and everyone gave the thumbs up to Paul Soye’s The Boy In The Gap. Can it really be that this is his first novel, so fine is the writing achievement? We were into the suspense from the very first line, I remember the first night…
Read MoreThe List | 101 Books. I like the approach to reading in this blog. Robert Bruce takes Time Magazine’s Greatest 100 Novels (since 1923) and adds in Ulysses. He is working his way through the list and compiling his own rankings as he reads. When he finsihes reading a book, he asks the simple question:…
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Anne Robinson hosts My Life in Books. Ten episodes on BBC Two in the run-up to World Book Day. There is an episode each weekday evening this week at 6.30. I got myself organised for the first of these last evening, with author PD James and (55 years her junior) radio presenter Richard Bacon. This programme was a…
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Neil Jordan’s new novel Mistaken is about two Dubliners, Kevin and Gerard, who spend their lives being mistaken for one another. A mix of thriller and gothic genres, it is Neil Jordan’s first novel in six years. You can see Neil Jordan talk about his work on TV3 here. All the Kyleglass Book Worms agree that the book…
Read MoreGoodbye, Waterstones, Dawson Street branch « The Anti-Room. Antonia Hart’s piece on The Anti-Room Blog about Waterstones of Dawson Street, which closes its doors today for the last time, expresses the feelings of many. I will miss the browsing, followed by musing in the Reader’s Cafe and then more browsing. A perfect spot for literary rejuvenation is now no…
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