Rick O'Shea

  As I keep getting asked on Twitter for suggestions to throw in your suitcase for holidays this Summer I thought I’d knock something together all in one place. I’m going to suggest some books I’ve already read this year that I think you should try and then give you a list of things I fully intend to have read myself by the end of Summer 2014. Of course, everyone’s definition of a holiday read is different so there’s a fairly wide selection…   Part One – Stuff I’ve Read (click the titles for full reviews) For a quirky, easy to read love story – Daniel Glattauer […]

Book Forty Three 2014:  The Shallows by Nicholas Carr Even though Nicholas Carr published this book in 2010 and so much has moved so much further down the line since then, this is one you have to read. It starts with how technologies have rewired the human brain since the invention of alphabets, writing, maps and printing (stuff covered on much greater detail in James Gleick’s brilliant book The Information) and then gets into the real meat – how daily use of websites, hyperlinks, Google and the internet in general is changing the way the human race thinks, acts and assimilates what goes on […]

Book Forty Two 2014:  I Think Therefore I Play by Andrea Pirlo I pretty much never read sports books. Ever. That doesn’t mean I’m not a lifelong football fan and that I show the occasional odd interest in other sports when something interesting is happening but the idea of reading a professional sportsperson’s autobiography doesn’t rank very highly on my  list of things to be done this week. So why this? Well, firstly there’s Pirlo’s beard. He commands your attention from the moment you see the cover. The quotes on the back are pretty interesting too – he reads a little […]

Book Forty One 2014:  Button Button by Richard Matheson This is probably no different to many other collection of sci-fi short stories I’ve ever come across. It has the poor, the decent, the bizarre (Dying Room Only is pretty much a noir story and The Jazz Machine a freeform poem) and then the genuinely brilliant (that includes the title story, No Such Thing As A Vampire, Clothes Make The Man and Mute). This is, I know Matheson is a genuinely great writer. I’ve read his rightly legendary (pardon the pun) I Am Legend and when you see how many of his other stories have made it into the pop […]

Book Forty 2014:  Memories Of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez This falls under my category of “authors I know I should have read at some stage but inexplicably I never got around to” and why, oh why, oh why has it taken me this long? This is a short start (my wife is reading Love In The Time Of Cholera at the moment and hasn’t been able to put it down) but he is everything they say; vivid in his imagery, elegant of thought, sexually obsessed and in one sentence alone nails who I am and my entire […]

Book Thirty Nine 2014:  The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida   This one came across my radar when I saw David Mitchell (author of the dazzling Cloud Atlas) on The Daily Show last year talking about the translation he’d just been involved with of a book by a Japanese boy with autism who had learned to communicate and then write about his feeling using a character grid his mother had helped him make. Some of the ideas expressed in here are exceptional for any 13-year-old and head-opening for those of us who don’t have to deal with what Naoki Higashida and […]