Rick O'Shea

Book Fourteen 2014:  Rainbow Pie – A Memoir Of Redneck America by Joe Bageant This one of those wonderful “I stumbled on it in a bookstore one Sunday morning when I hadn’t really intended going in to buy anything” sort of books. It’s both a memoir of growing up in the 50s in rural Virginia in what he calls himself “redneck country”, the disappearance of subsistence farming in such places after the second world war and a scathing attack on the creation of what he claims is an enormous poor white underclass of over 50 million and how the industrial interests of […]

Book Thirteen 2014:  The Thing About December by Donal Ryan I don’t want to tell you too much about this genuinely incredible, stand-out piece of fiction. It’s set in relatively-modern day Ireland and, through the eyes of its narrator, tells a story of family, small towns (and how people can be total bastards to those closest to them) and how tabloid newspapers can twist a story any way they want. I actually have no criticisms of it. I love the voices her creates for his characters, the sometimes stifling sense of parochialism he creates, the arc of his stories. He […]

Book Twelve 2014:  Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks Not the first of the Culture novels of the late Iain M. Banks I’ve read and I wonder if that has coloured my feelings about it. I read the exceptional The Player Of Games last year (they don’t run in sequence so you can, in theory, read them any old way you like) and this is just a little less pacy, a bite more long-winded in terms of the action that happens, a little less cerebral. There were times when I just wanted him to get the hell on with it, which is a […]

Book Eleven 2014:  The Quiet American by Graham Greene Reading Graham Greene is part of my drive I started at Christmas to read more novels from pre-1960 by what are broadly referred to as “classic authors”. The ones I thought I’d missed and left behind… This was not what I expected at all (I was thinking more John LeCarré, more espionage, more political intrigue). Instead it’s a tight, character-driven human interest story (with a fair amount of intrigue in the backdrop, it has to be said) set against the backdrop of Vietnam in the late 50s while the French are still […]

Book Ten 2014:  The Age Of Absurdity by Michael Foley I have our own Cormac Battle to thank for handing me this one and insisting I read it. I have a genuinely love for books that examine the human experience not from a self-help angle but from a philosophical / sociological perspective (the Alain DeBottons of this world). This is right up my street. Through a series of different lenses Michael Foley looks at the human drive to strive to be happy and why we fail so frequently, particularly since the beginning of the 20th century. He covers everything from […]

Book Nine 2014:  The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey I know, I know. I bought a stack of books at Xmas. One or two since. But Easons was open yesterday and it was early and I was vulnerable and out for a walk… Thus I came to grab a book I’ve read a lot about lately – The Girl With All The Gifts. I’m going to reveal nothing, shy to say that it’s post-apocalyptic and has zombies. Sort of. At times it reminds me of Hugh Howey’s excellent Wool, at time John Wyndham’s *classic* Day Of The […]