Rick O'Shea

Book Twenty Six 2014:   The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami I am immediately aware as I type this that Haruki Murakami is one of *those* authors that split people straight down the middle. You will either be immediately taken away by his characters, world, writing or you’ll think he’s a cryptic nonsense-merchant of the highest order and throw his books away in frustration. Be aware I am in the former group. Being honest I’ve come late to him, the first thing of his I read was the epic trilogy 1Q84 last year but I fully intend to make up for […]

Book Twenty Five 2014:   The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb As I’ve said here before I love books that tilt the world slightly on its axis and cause me to look at things differently; this one is no exception. Ostensibly a book about events that occur entirely outside of the range of what one would normally expect to happen (9/11, financial crashes, tsunamis, the fate of Lebanon in the 80s, Facebook) it also ranges widely across vast territory how the financial system works (he used to work on Wall Street) to the very art of predicting anything in *any* field of […]

Book Twenty Four 2014:   The Three by Sarah Lotz Typical. You haven’t read anything great by a female author in ages and then four come along at once 🙂 The pitch for Sarah Lotz’s The Three is best left at one line – four planes crash across the world on the same day, there are only 3 survivors, all children… The story is told in a fragmented style from inside the construct of a book that has been written about the events of what’s become known as Black Thursday soon after those events themselves. You hear about what happened from people […]

Book Twenty Three 2014:   The Second World War by Antony Beevor Does what it says on the tin. It’s an extensive and exhaustive history of not just 1939 to 1945 but the events preceding it in Asia and elsewhere. If I have one small criticism it’s that there are times when the maps peppered throughout the book aren’t detailed or frequent enough, other then that it’s terrific. I’m keeping this short as you’ll know immediately whether or not this is for you by the size and the subject 🙂 The one irony? I had to read it in 2 sections as my brain got so top-heavy with information – I […]

Book Twenty Two 2014:   Can Anybody Help Me? by Sinéad Crowley First things first – I will be astonished if someone hasn’t made this into a 4 part thriller for d’telly in the next year or so. It centres on a women with a young child who chats regularly with a number of women on a popular internet forums for mums. One of them goes missing… And then another… And then she has to try to convince a pregnant detective that there is no coincidence involved. Again, as with so many other books I’ve had land on my desk this year this probably […]

Book Twenty One 2014:  Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent   I’m going to have to be straight with you and say that if I’d come across Liz Nugent’s Unravelling Oliver in a bookstore there’s probably almost zero chance I would have picked it up and bought it. How wrong could I be? It’s a story that starts with a rich, older So-Co-Dub man beating his wife to within an inch of her life in their home. He’s never laid a hand on her or anyone before. Ever. By the end of the first chapter you want to punch *him* in the face. […]