Goodreads Ireland discussion
What are your reading 2022-2025
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Thomas, Moderator
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Jun 01, 2023 07:08PM
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I have just finished The Raggy Boy Trilogy by Patrick Galvin purporting to chronicle his early years growing up in Cork, then time in Reform School and finally the RAF during WW2. Overall it is an entertaining book but I preferred the first part over the others. It is full of childish wonder which is then replaced by the (almost) predictable horror of his time in Reform School.
The last part covering time in the RAF falls somewhere between Spike Milligan and Catch-22. It gets a bit monotonous after a time.
I gave it 3 stars.
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by Tricia Fields It is book 7 in an excellent police procedural series. Both my wife and I enjoy this series. My 4 star review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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Nothing is Written in Stone: The Notebooks of Justin Keating is a fascinating read; JK was certainly an opinionated guy, maybe a little overbearingly sure of himself. Is he still a well-remembered figure in Ireland?
A book was published a few years back on JFK's visit to Ireland in the early 1960s. By a well-known tv personality. So yes I suppose but not so much to the younger generation.He was an absolute hero to my mother's generation.
Close to finishing Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society, which is one of those books that demands intense sentence-by-sentence concentration and a lot of note-taking. The farthest thing from pop history - absolutely hardcore.
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Thomas Hardy shrewdly observes in A Pair of Blue Eyes that a great many friendships are makeshift, emerging because people happen to be around and not because those are the ones you would choose given your druthers. This reality is crucial in the Anglo-Irish writer Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, the first in her Balkan Trilogy (and the six-volume Fortunes of War), in which we are confronted with the disparate members of the international community in Bucharest at the beginning of World War II.Our focal center is the newly-married Pringles, Guy and Harriet, but we are more privy to Harriet’s perspective. For her this is clearly a case of “marry in haste, repent at leisure”, because she knew very little about Guy when she jumped in, and seems increasingly exasperated by what she discovers. He, a university instructor, is blandly tolerant of whatever goofballs they encounter; she is much more selective, and this inevitably creates a lot of tension.
Guy’s interpersonal approach is better-suited to expatriate life, of course, yet I find myself deeply sympathetic to Harriet (as Manning intends), because I have been there, oh Lord have I been there. There is no doubt that you meet a lot of screwy messed-up people in the international rounds, on the run from something or other (frequently themselves). My strategy has been to be polite but distant, not to invite more contact than necessary. But Guy, perhaps out of a desire to examine “specimens”, gathers such folk in.
I’ll leave off there at the moment, not to give too much away (and I’m not done with the novel yet either).
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I enjoyed it and recommend it to WWII history fans. My 4.5 star review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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My 4.5 star review, rounded down. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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My 4.5 star review, rounded down. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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I am hoping some of you will read "On the Run," a story about a Mullaghmore farmer whose arrest as a terrorist during the Troubles separates him from his wife and teenage son, and sets all three on a painful journey to find themselves and find their way back to one another.On the RUN: A Novel
By William Shaw ISBN: 979-8-218-168797
Weeks after his father, Terence, is jailed in Maze Prison, Tim Connolly arrives in New York to stay with relatives. Bridget, his mother, believes her seventeen-year-old son will be safer with an ocean between him and the Troubles. Tim is not safe, however. Resented by his American uncle and bullied and beaten at school, he becomes sullen, withdrawn, and desperately home- sick. But when a gym class exercise on the school track reveals his remarkable speed, the track coach recruits Tim for the team. Running becomes Tim’s obsession. With every success he gains confidence and courage. Tim’s success, however, infuriates his enemies, whose plots against him grow increasingly violent.
Meanwhile his father’s hunger strike, and his mother’s controversial women’s anti-H- Block crusade, weigh heavily on Tim. As he trains for the 1983 National AAU 800-Meter Championship, Tim is unprepared for the series of shocking events that will occur on race day.
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My review. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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I recommend it to historical fiction fans. My 4 star review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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My 3.5-star review, rounded up https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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