ONTD Reading Challenge Around the World (May): IRELAND!
Hey, guys!! Can you believe it's gonna be MAY already??? I hope you have been enjoying the reading challenge so far. Let us know in the comments how you've been faring and how much you liked (or... not) what you've read so far.
This month our destination is IRELAND, a country I am happy to say I've visited, and it really is gorgeous and the people are very nice, although I didn't meet anyone who thought they were a bumblebee (or at least, no one told me so!).
I gathered some very nice book recs for you guys. Ireland is a country with excellent literature, for all tastes. I tried to mix up some classics (not boring ones like Ulysses because I don't hate y'all), with some modern classics or best-sellers and even some hidden gems (maybe hidden if you're not from Ireland, but still). Also, for the purposes of this challenge, it's ok to read something by Northern Irish writers, not just from the Republic of Ireland. I even included in the list one Anglo-Irish writer, hopefully no one's going to be too mad with me about it.
And now, on to the book recs!
Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
OP note: Even though I haven't read it, I hear the satire "A Modest Proposal" is also very good and funny.
A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver's final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire - in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
OP note: I just love Oscar Wilde, alright? You can pretty much read anything by him and chances are it will be great (in fact, he’s got some short stories for children, like The Ghost of Canterville, which are fabulous). But this is one classic I think everyone can read and enjoy, it’s not super long, the language is not super old-timey, and oh yeah, it’s achingly beautiful.
Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be-in other ages, perhaps".
Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu)
J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Gothic novella Carmilla is a precursor to Dracula by Bram Stoker (OP note: also Irish, BTW). Yet it is an important one, and in Carmilla, the narrator Laura is uneasy but powerless under the obsessive attentions of - and potent spell cast by - the title character. Le Fanu ultimately describes the relationship between the two women with a typically Victorian stricture, yet the Sapphic implications cannot be ignored - though the central conflict, like in Dracula, lies in the struggle for possession of a young woman’s immortal soul.
Irish Ghost Stories (various authors, edited by David Stuart Davies)
Blend the wild and fevered Irish imagination with their wonderful facility for recounting a dark, compelling tale, add a dash of the supernatural, and you have a potent brew of spine-tingling tales. This anthology of the best ghost stories from Ireland and Irish writers includes contributions from such masters of the art of raising as Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and Rosa Mulholland. Within the pages of this collection you will find strange accounts of haunted houses, death warnings from beyond the grave, and revengeful spirits, all guaranteed to stir the imagination and chill the blood.
The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen)
The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations.
In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the 1930s, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home in London. There she encounters the attractive, carefree cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and he fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal-and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature.
Good Behaviour (Molly Keane)
Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissable desires.
The Country Girls (Edna O'Brien)
OP note: Listen to the author discussing the book with an audience for the BBC World Book Club here.
Meet Kate and Baba, two young Irish country girls who have spent their childhood together. As they leave the safety of their convent school in search of life and love in the big city, they struggle to maintain their somewhat tumultuous relationship. Kate, dreamy and romantic, yearns for true love, while Baba just wants to experience the life of a single girl. Although they set out to conquer the world together, as their lives take unexpected turns, Kate and Baba must ultimately learn to find their own way.
The Commitments (Roddy Doyle)
OP note: This novel was selected for the BBC World Book Club, so you can listen to the author discussing it with an audience. Doyle is one of the biggest contemporary Irish writers, his best-selling novel is Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. JK Rowling once said his novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was one of her favourites for the accurate portrayal of domestic violence.
Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabbitte, brilliantly coached by Joey 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from the parish hall to the steps of the studio door. But can The Commitments live up to their name?
Skippy Dies (Paul Murray)
Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop? Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory? Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love? Or could "the Automator", the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school, have something to hide? Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined.
The Wonder (Emma Donoghue)
The Irish Midlands, 1859. An English nurse, Lib Wright, is summoned to a tiny village to observe what some are claiming as a medical anomaly or a miracle - a girl said to have survived without food for months. Tourists have flocked to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, and a journalist has come down to cover the sensation. The Wonder is a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.
The Secret Scripture (Sebastian Barry)
OP note: Another BBC World Book Club pick!! Listen here.
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates.
Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.
Unravelling Oliver (Liz Nugent)
Oliver Ryan, handsome, charismatic, and successful, has long been married to his devoted wife, Alice. Together they write and illustrate award-winning children’s books; their life together one of enviable privilege and ease-until, one evening after a delightful dinner, Oliver delivers a blow to Alice that renders her unconscious, and subsequently beats her into a coma.
In the aftermath of such an unthinkable event, as Alice hovers between life and death, the couple’s friends, neighbours, and acquaintances try to understand what could have driven Oliver to commit such a horrific act. As his story unfolds, layers are peeled away to reveal a life of shame, envy, deception, and masterful manipulation.
Rachel's Holiday (Marian Keyes)
OP note: Marian Keyes is perhaps best known for her book Watermelon, which I don’t particularly like, so I had her pegged for a writer of so-so chick lit books. As it turns out I was being really unfair. Rachel’s Holiday was once (you guessed it) the BBC World Book Club’s pick so I read it because of that and was wowed. It is part of the same series as Watermelon (each book follows a Walsh sister) and it gets reallll about addiction (Keyes is writing from experience). I know for a fact a lot of people on ONTD will like it, so give it a chance.
Meet Rachel Walsh. She has a pair of size 8 feet and such a fondness for recreational drugs that her family has forked out the cash for a spell in Cloisters - Dublin’s answer to the Betty Ford Clinic. She’s only agreed to her incarceration because she’s heard that rehab is wall-to-wall jacuzzis, gymnasiums and rock stars going tepid turkey - and it’s about time she had a holiday. But what Rachel doesn’t count on are the toe-curling embarrassments heaped on her by family and group therapy, the dearth of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll - and missing Luke, her ex. What kind of a new start in life is this?
Brooklyn (Colm Tóibín)
Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.
Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland" -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.
Milkman (Anna Burns)
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
NON-FICTION
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Patrick Radden Keefe)
In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.
A Ghost in the Throat (Doireann Ní Ghríofa)
In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.
I Am, I Am, I Am (Maggie O'Farrell)
OP note: This is a memoir. The author is also very well known for her critically acclaimed historical fiction book Hamnet, about Shakespeare's son.
I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter--for whom this book was written--from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers.
Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O'Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.
Constellations (Sinéad Gleeson)
How do you tell the story of life that is no one thing? How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? And how do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In these powerful and daring essays, Sinead Gleeson does that very thing. In doing so she delves into a range of subjects: art, illness, ghosts, grief, and our very ways of seeing.
Don't Touch My Hair (Emma Dabiri)
OP note: Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian author (Irish mom, Nigerian dad).
Emma Dabiri can tell you the first time she chemically straightened her hair. She can describe the smell, the atmosphere of the salon, and her mix of emotions when she saw her normally kinky tresses fall down her shoulders. For as long as Emma can remember, her hair has been a source of insecurity, shame, and-from strangers and family alike-discrimination. And she is not alone.
Black hair continues to be erased, appropriated, and stigmatized to the point of taboo. Through her personal and historical journey, Dabiri gleans insights into the way racism is coded in society’s perception of black hair-and how it is often used as an avenue for discrimination. Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, and into today's Natural Hair Movement, exploring everything from women's solidarity and friendship, to the criminalization of dreadlocks, to the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids.
Through the lens of hair texture, Dabiri leads us on a historical and cultural investigation of the global history of racism-and her own personal journey of self-love and finally, acceptance.
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So what's your pick for this month, ONTD?