Rick O'Shea

Book Fifty Four 2014:  Munich Airport by Greg Baxter And this could not be more different from the book that I read for number 53… I suppose whether you like it or not depends on your tolerance of small, human stories that centre around families and main characters that, like many written in modern fiction, are loners and live quiet lives of introversion and introspection. I suppose I always wanted to be one of those characters so that worked out perfectly for me… The whole novel is told in a series of flashbacks while the main, unnamed character is sitting fogbound in […]

Book Fifty Three 2014:  I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes I’ll be honest, out of every genre of the bookreadin’ I find it the hardest to find thrillers that I really, genuinely can engage with and lose myself in. It happens every now and then – Douglas Kennedy’s The Big Picture was one, Robert Harris’ Fatherland another, I read and very much enjoyed the first of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books last year and even *says it in a whisper* The DaVinci Code… I’d heard so much good stuff about this I thought it was going to be a near-impossible task […]

As promised, here are the links to the books covered on tonight’s Arena on RTE Radio 1. All very much well worth your time, click each book cover for the individual review. And the audio is now up on the RTE Radio 1 Arena website.   

Book Fifty Two 2014:  A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness Sorry, Patrick. I had long, long since intended to buy The Knife Of Never Letting Go as so many people I knew had said good things about it and it just slipped through the cracks. I was lucky enough to be on a panel with the author Patrick Ness in Easons recently to launch their Department 51 and his agent got chatting to me and promised to send me a care package 🙂 A Monster Calls is written by Patrick based on an original idea by the late Siobhan Dowd and deals […]

Book Fifty One 2014:  Selfish, Whining Monkeys by Rod Liddle I’ll be honest here – I knew I probably wasn’t going to agree with everything Rod Liddle has to say in this book but I’m a huge believer in not always reading inside ever decreasing circles and so… The thing that did astonish me was how much of what he said I was nodding my head to (a fair amount). It’s a ranty, neither left nor right series of sort-of connected chapters about how people today have pissed away everything previous generations worked for because of things like easy credit, easy divorce and […]

Book Fifty 2014:  In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami I’ve been going through a Japanese thing in recent times, mostly because of the work of the other, more famous Murakami, a collection of Japanese sci-fi I bought a couple of years back, my love for Japanese cinema and my wont, some day, to go there. This does pretty much exactly what it says n the cover up there – it’s the story of Kenji, a guide for sex tourists in late 90s Tokyo and Frank, a client he meets just before New Year’s Eve who he comes to believe may be a serial killer… […]