A WRITER READS

Writers have all sorts of rules about reading while they’re writing their own books.  They read biographies when they’re writing fiction.  Or if they’re reading fiction, they don’t read the same genre – if they’re producing crime thrillers, they might read a love story, or if their own work is very contemporary, they might bury themselves in historical fiction.  

Or there are others who do read authors they admire within the genre they aspire to excel at – for pointers – even with their own work in progress.  

But the irrefutable fact is that reading is part of the job, no matter what way the writer goes about it.  

My own reading taste is eclectic and varies as to when and where I’m reading and for what purposes.  For example, during my research for my second novel Because He Loved Her which features a professional rugby-player as one of the main characters, I read Brian O’Driscoll’s auto-biography The Test,  Belonging by Welsh player Alun Wyn Jones and for a sense of the Gaelic sports’ code ethos, Devotion by Mickey Harte whilst I was writing.  The titles of all three books were indeed apposite, as each offered invaluable insights into the motivation and group ideology of sportsmen in particular, which my character was struggling to embrace.

It is very seldom that I manage to read immediately on release the work of fellow authors whom I admire, so you’ll forgive me if some of the works referenced are from last year.  When trying to progress my own work, there just isn’t the time – and I don’t believe in becoming so obsessive about my craft – that I intend to get by on four hours’ sleep!

Last year’s favourite cache included French Braid by Anne Tyler.  Anything by Anne Tyler is on my go-to list.  In fact so blindly do I buy her that I have been known to buy the same title twice – as happened with Redhead by the Side of the Road.  If ever there was an enigmatic title prize, well it has to go to that book!  As a template for understatement in writing, this is your author. I don’t think I have forgiven her yet for the way she made me cry at the end of  Clock Dance (2018).

In the summer, I caught up with what I call my ‘Belfast’ cycle – those works I never got around to on publication.  And late as I was to their reading – ironically, immersing myself in Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, Jan Carson’s The Raptures and Lucy Caldwell’s These Days in quick succession, proved a very enjoyable exercise.  Great to read fiction set in the same time period from the perspective of both communities as recounted by Kennedy and Carson, with their signature accuracy and humour.  Lucy Caldwell’s magnificent prose and her depiction of the bombing of Belfast in WWII, highlighted the deficits in my Republic of Ireland Inter cert history – as I remember learning absolutely nothing about it!  By the time I was on Caldwell, I had taken to reading with the map of Belfast open on my adjacent phone – as the topography of that city became so real and critical to the understanding of all three Belfast cycle books!

Although not set in Northern Ireland, but most definitely with a Northern Irish voice was the very enjoyable first adult novel from Sheena Wilkinson, Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau, Harper Collins Ireland.  I just loved the interplay between the naïve new employee April McVey and the intriguing Mrs Hart of the title.  Another novel where location just pings off the page. Now out in regular paperback.

Back working intensively on my own One More Time, my next reading glut had to wait until my annual Sicilian holiday at the end of September, where I caught up with the more recent Dónal Ryans – Strange Flowers and The Queen of Dirt Island.  The perfect weight and length for lounger reading, I enjoyed these two far more than his earlier works with the terrific take on inter-generational feistiness in his unique rural families.  For laughs, Ciara Geraghty’s Queen Bee entertained as did Zoe Miller’s penultimate novel The House in the Woods which I picked up in the hotel mini-library.  Looking forward to Zoe’s latest The Birthday Weekend, Hachette Ireland.  Una Mannion’s Tell Me Who I am got me through the long wait and flight home from Palermo and left me thinking about how people can live under the radar of suspicion for a very long time, even among a close community. 

My current reading table includes the recently finished Barcelona, a collection of short stories by one of my favourite authors Mary Costello.  This long-awaited collection didn’t disappoint on the starkness of the human psychology portrayed, but for this delicate soul, I found the animal cruelty references peppered throughout too hard to stomach.  The physically weightier tome that is Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is half-read and I’m enjoying it greatly.  It sits underneath – my – second copy of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren, which I have resumed at the place I left it in Sicily last October.  

Yes, to the light-fingered, closet Sicilian Anne Enright fan who relieved me of my first copy when I carelessly left it unattended on a table in the bar – you know who you are!