Rick O'Shea

Book Thirty Eight 2014:  From Out Of The City by John Kelly It’s always hard reading something written by someone you know, as you feel a pressure to like it more than you probably would if it were something by a complete stranger. Therefore it’s an enormous relief when you do read such a thing and end up thinking it amongst the best things you’ve read this year so far. From Out Of The City is set in a mid-distant future dystopian puppet-state Ireland that’s gone to the wild, feral dogs and where the U.S. President has just been assassinated […]

Book Thirty Seven 2014:  The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard Now we’re talking. I stumbled across Kingdom Come a few years back and quite liked it but people speak in reverential tones about his earlier stuff, and rightly so. The Drowned World deals with a future a few decades after solar flares have destroyed the Earth’s climate and most of the planet is flooded. A few million humans are left living at the poles and almost everything is underwater. Some scientists are rifling through the upper levels of the lagooned cities and human being have changed, forever. It’s not what you think, […]

Book Thirty Six 2014:  Frank by Jon Ronson Less a book, more a genuinely fascinating long article about Jon Ronson and his time playing keyboard in Frank Sidebottom’s band, a call he gets from Frank years later and then the writing of the movie itself. It is short, but it’s only 9 quid so that’s fair enough. In it he talks about a much longer biography of Frank that’s being written. I’d be well up for that…

Book Thirty Five 2014:  Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion I’m kind of disappointed I blearily watched the movie version of this on a Transatlantic flight 2 years ago, I’d rather have come to it fresh (if one can say that about a book with zombies). This is a nice, leftfield take on the post-apocalypse in that “R” (that’s all he can remember of his original name) is a zombie who is, sort of, still human. He’s not mad about eating people, still likes music, can sort of hold a conversation, and then falls in love with a human. It’s cracking fun, really. Pretty […]

Book Thirty Four 2014:  Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks This isn’t the first time I’ve read the always fascinating Dr. Oliver Sacks. I, like many others, started reading him after the movie Awakenings and in the intervening years I’ve made my way through Awakenings itself, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, The Mind’s Eye and now Hallucinations. It does exactly what it says on the tin and deals with the nature of how and why the human brain hallucinates, talks about why it’s mostly not in people with mental illness but how it happens to so many people […]

Book Thirty Three 2014:  The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks I first read The Wasp Factory….. I was going to estimate an actual date there but it was donkey’s year ago. Sometime in the 90s. I remember being blown away by it then (it was the first Iain or Iain M. Banks I had read) and it was thrilling to find out, all these years later, that it was just as incredible as I remembered it. It’s dark, vicious, empty, dangerous, brave and an incredible story of the growing up of one very, very different 16 year old boy on a Scottish island. […]