Clodagh Phelan's Blog, page 5

Intensely irritating but ultimately endearing

You know how it is when you know someone who is intensely irritating. They drive you nuts. But just sometimes, unless they are real monsters, you find that inexplicably you get quite fond of them. Even though they still annoy the hell out of you.

Some books are like that.

I love The New Yorker. Or rather I love the idea of it. I haven’t read that many issues though I am familiar with the cartoons; it’s one of those magazines that are part of my childhood and growing up. Like Punch. So I was eag...

Srsly?

The Oxford English Dictionary has been an invaluable source of pleasure and learning since it was first published in 1884. Now that it’s on the web it’s there, whenever you want it. You can of course subscribe but much of it is free. Constantly revised and researched by an army of editors and experts in England and the USA, the online version is updated no less than four times a year.

It’s fascinating how a new or updated word will have one person smiling and another snarling. Why, for instanc...

Circling over Shannon

Browsing through a variety of websites, looking for Irish words and expressions, I was struck by a couple of things. By the amount of words we have for being drunk. And by the fact that, being drunk apart, there are far more words for bad things than there are for good. Nevertheless, most of these expressions are savage. No, not running round in grass skirts with spears; it means really brilliant.

I noticed another thing this time round. Many of these expressions are so familiar to me that at...

Bears

It started with Twitter. Many good things do. For all the unpleasantness you hear about, my experience of Twitter has been ‘A Good Thing’. I’ve read articles and posts I would almost certainly not have come across in any other way. I’ve met and tweeted with some lovely people. Still do. And Twitter also provides a rich source of topics for blog posts. Like bears.

I love bears. All bears. Live bears and toy bears. I still have my original teddy, Sandy. Boring name I know but I was only small. H...

A Good Read

The description ‘page turners’ might have been coined for Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers. I would say that they are the perfect time waster – like cats on the Internet – except that this would be to do them an injustice. Well written, exciting, with a charismatic hero and tension that builds from page to page, they truly are books that you cannot put down.

I’ve read maybe half a dozen, including this one. While I thoroughly enjoyed them all, A Wanted Man has more substance than most of the...

Curate’s egg – good in parts

Certain books should carry the equivalent of a health warning. ‘Do not read this book unless you have read all the books in the series in sequence.’ Having said that, I don’t think it should be necessary. A book should either stand-alone or, if it references earlier works, the references need to be woven unobtrusively into the plot. It’s not what happens here. Great chunks of backstory are shoehorned in, getting in the way and adding to the confusion (of which there is a lot.) There seem to b...

Up-Goer Five – a brilliant, and often hilarious, lesson in precise description

My latest discovery, via Twitter, that wonderful source of mind food, is the splendid Mental Floss. It’s stuffed with amazing, informative and fascinating facts and articles. Among them these delightful examples of up-goer five speak. What on God’s good earth is up-goer five speak?I’ll explain. Up-goer five speak was inspired by Randall Munroe of the webcomic xkcd, who published a description of the Saturn V rocket using only the 1,000 most frequently used words in the English Language. Thus...

Tractor

There we all were. Sitting on the bus. Minding our own business. More or less. As less as you can be in these days of mobile phones. The woman seated directly behind me was sharing her complicated love life with everyone within earshot. A man at the very back was bellowing into his phone, which was to all intents and purposes redundant. Tinny, discordant sounds were leaking very loudly from the earphones of a pie-faced youth at least three rows away. In other words, just a normal, everyday jo...

A different moon

This is the first Neil Gaiman book I have read and I was looking forward to it immensely. Glancing through other reviews I could see that others felt it isn’t his best book. Though plenty didn’t agree. However, having nothing to compare it to I felt I was lucky as I couldn’t be disappointed. But I was. A little. At first.

It was the title that drew me to this book. ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’. Posssibly sparked by something I had misheard on the radio, my imagination conjoured up magica...

Altogether elsewhere, vastHerds of reindeer move across...

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.

W.H.Auden