Art Kavanagh

Having raved about Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories, I found her first two novels less satisfying. This third one sounds more like it — I hope 📖

Helen Mirren is great, of course, but really unimaginative casting for The Thursday Murder Club 🍿 Oh well, I probably wouldn’t have watched it anyway.

The latest post from Talk about books is Flight from Paradise: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, about his Kashmir novel from 2005 📖

[Adam] Zeman’s research suggests that people with hyperphantasia enjoy especially rich autobiographical memories.

Hyperphantasia and the quest to understand vivid imaginations. Conversely, aphantasia and “severely deficient autobiographical memory” often go together. (I have both.) Often, but not always. Why is that?

I’ve finally read The Mill on the Floss, after two half-hearted attempts when I was much younger. It took me 9 days: Eliot is not a quick read. I’d read almost nothing of hers (just Silas Marner at school). Middlemarch was the only set text on my BA course that I didn’t finish, but I’ll try again 📖

For a while now, at the back of my mind, I’ve been vaguely, distractedly perplexed that the Dublin Review of Books has been publishing so little material and so irregularly. I just realized that they publish plenty that doesn’t make it into their RSS feed! Should’ve thought of that before.

TFW you try to extend the selection of some text but iOS scrolls the page instead! 😡

I’ve been trying to write a response to this piece in Vox by Sigal Samuel, “3 Body Problem’s most mind-bending question isn’t about aliens”. I’m not happy with what I’ve got so far but don’t want to spend any more time on it. Maybe I should just let the draft sit there for another week.

I read Jane Harper’s The Dry a few weeks ago and enjoyed it thoroughly; but yesterday I found another book of hers, The Lost Man on special offer (€5 for a new hardback) and I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to buy it. I wonder why not. I got Téa Obreht’s Inland instead 📚

Last summer, my brain’s internal radio was alternating Tommy Steele’s “Little White Bull” and the musichall tune “Down at the Old Bull and Bush”. I thought I must have seen something about a bull somewhere, but it turned out that the earworms had independent coincidental origins.

I hate earworms, but can’t get rid of them. For weeks now, I have been waking up with Moore’s “She Is Far from the Land”🎶 playing in my head, and I have no idea what’s put it there. I’m sure I haven’t heard it recently (that’s to say in the last 50ish years).

The latest Talk about books is Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various. The 6th Faber anthology of “New Irish short stories”📖 includes 24 stories. I’ve written about 4 stories, with brief notes on 4 more.

This Irish Times headline quotes somebody as saying that Simon Harris used to turn up in suits three times too big for him. If he wore suits three sizes too big I could accept it but suits three times too big would have to be specially made, wouldn’t they?

I think this may be all my fault. I just looked up Trevor Griffiths on Wikipedia and (having gone down a rabbit hole) elsewhere a few days ago, in part to see if he was still alive. And now he isn’t. Sorry about that 🎭

Latest post on my own site: Print-on-demand? Amazon has been sending out print-on-demand copies of books when they run out of traditionally printed regular stock (which they deliberately keep at low levels). Is this acceptable?

Fears that AI poses some kind of existential threat are highly effective misdirection. AI isn’t going to achieve “world domination”™️. The humans running the corporations that make it probably will unless stopped ☹️

I liked Dervla McTiernan’s first three novels and found the fourth readable if unsatisfactory in some respects. But, on the basis of her piece in Crime Reads yesterday, I don’t expect to be reading her new one. It doesn’t sound like the kind of story that would appeal to me 📚

I bought a copy of Tana French’s The Wych Elm about 4½ years ago but have only now got around to reading it. It’s devastating, even if you find the narrator unsympathetic, as many reviewers did. There are parts of it I liked very much but overall it leaves a sour aftertaste 📖

Maybe it’s actually a good review: clearly letting me know that this book is not for me!

Here’s an extremely irritating book review. I’ve read just 2 of Nicole Flattery’s short stories and didn’t like them. I suspected she might be a better novelist than a short story writer. But this review leaves me with no inclination to find out for myself.

Here’s yet another good reason not to buy books from Amazon 📚

The new Talk about books post (on time, for the first time in ages) looks at Caroline O’Donoghue’s second novel for adults, Scenes of a Graphic Nature 📖. A filmmaker in her late 20s tries to find out what happened 60 years earlier, when her father was the lone survivor of a school tragedy.