Art Kavanagh

Talk about books: a fortnightly publication about things I’ve read

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.

Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature

Caroline O’Donoghue has written three novels for adults and a YA series. So far, I’ve read only the second of the adult novels though, based on reviews of the third, I intend to read The Rachel Incident (2023) as soon as I can get it in B-format paperback. The second adult novel, Scenes of a Graphic Nature (2020), is the first-person narrative of Charlotte Regan, who is just about to turn 29.

Flying six people to space is cheaper than sending an asylum seeker to Rwanda, an MP has said.

Cheaper to send people into space than to Rwanda, MPs hear Flying them there, maybe, but what about food, shelter, oxygen, protective clothing etc? I don’t think he’s thought this through.

I’ve just deleted my Substack account, something I’ve been thinking about for a while. That means cancelling my one paid subscription. The unpaid ones I can continue to read via RSS 😎 I had been thinking of going paid on Jeremy Noel-Tod’s Some Flowers Soon but I’ll have to manage without it.

I don’t see how you could spend even an hour in Dublin and not see the ruinous impact of the tech industry. We sold the city to these companies and made it impossible for anyone else to live here.

Nicole Flattery. When I lived in London for 18 years I missed Dublin. Reading this, I see that, more than 12 years after I came back to Ireland, I still do ☹️

My iPhone 12 Mini’s small screen means that I use Safari’s reader view a lot. But the way it leaves out author names/bylines is really frustrating. I know the fault is largely the publishers’ who don’t necessarily mark up such things “semantically”. I know I’ve said this before.

So it was easy for me to be the titular lead director.

Hey, a rare sighting of “titular” used in the old-fashioned (IMO “correct”) sense. These days, people say things like “titular character” where they would once simply have said “title character”. That drives me nuts, I’m afraid 🍿

I regularly mix up names that aren’t at all alike, so you can imagine how confused I was, having seen posters around Westport for a concert by Cara Dillon, I just read that Clara Dillon recently published her first novel.

I really wanted the Autonomy fiasco to be HP’s fault, not Lynch’s. Of course, it’s possible for both things to be true: even if Lynch inflated the value, it doesn’t necessarily follow that HP didn’t screw up.

My phone service provider regularly sends me emails urging me to “go 5G”, though there’s no 5G coverage in this area. Even 4G is a bit spotty since the storms earlier in the year ☹️

Late again, here’s the most recent post from Talk about books, Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam. Two years ago, I wrote about her short stories; now, I’ve got around to the novels 📖

Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam

Candia McWilliam published three novels over a seven-year period starting in the late 1980s: A Case of Knives (1988), A Little Stranger (1989) and Debatable Land (1994). These were followed in 1997 by a collection of short stories, Wait Till I Tell You. I wrote about that collection in Talk about books almost two years ago. Since 1997, there’s been no more fiction from McWilliam, though in 2010 she published a memoir, What to Look for in Winter, which I haven’t read.

I just noticed that someone whose Substack Notes I follow (I get their newsletter by RSS) has posted several Notes that I hadn’t seen, but would have liked to. Meanwhile, Substack’s algorithm serves up endless nonsense about how to write, build your following and cook Instagrammable dishes 😡

I got 8 out of 12 and it said “in the middle of your flop era”, but I thought 8/12 was good, actually. I was pleased with my performance; it wan’t bad at all. What actors said about major movie flops

Sad to hear that Edward Bond has died, though at least he had a long life. I think I only ever saw one of his plays — The Sea 🎭 — in performance, though I saw at least 3 different productions of hugely varying quality; I read (and compulsively reread) many others in Methuen editions.

Substack now has direct messages. It’s not a feature I’m likely to use very much (I sent maybe one every two years on Twitter) but we’ll see.

This year’s choice for One Dublin, One Book is Louise Nealon’s Snowflake 📖. The idea is that as many people as possible should read it during April. I’ve already read and written about it but it’s probably not too early to reread it.

Bernard Kops is dead. He was 97, but it’s still sad. I fondly remember a playwriting workshop he led at the CityLit, early 1990s, and I went with my mother (who was visiting from Ireland) to a performance of Playing Sinatra 🎭 in, my unreliable memory is convinced, Croydon.

I just posted the latest Talk about books. It looks at philosophical materialism in Paradise Lost: Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost 📖

Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic poem in 12 books (10 in the first edition, 1667), running to over 10,000 words lines, about original sin, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise for disobedience to God’s command. It contains many surprises. Its author had, in Eikonoklastes, defended the execution of the former king, Charles I. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, he had advanced a remarkably liberal theory about the conditions in which a people can depose and replace their monarch, and choose the mode of government.

Unfortunate BP employee gets fired because she wasn’t sufficiently suspicious of her husband: Insider trading.