what are you reading now?

[jenks]

Young skins by Colin Barrett. Short stories about repressed young men acting hard in west Ireland. Very good. Put onto it after watching Calm with horses on Netflix

It's excellent, isn't it. One of the best collections of short stories in the last few years.

 

[shiels]

Yes excellent, sad and funny, so much is familiar from going out in Donegal when I was younger. He captures the boredoms and excitements of town life for young ones, everyone knows everyone, big fish small ponds

Those culchie petrol heads were always looked down on by people from cities, me included. but I was fascinated and jealous too. when describing that life it’s obviously easy to sneer, but he manages to draw out the absurdity and comic aspects without patronising, even with people being so petty and violent theres a compassion and respect for the weird ways and hierarchies

 

[william kent]

That I really liked. I knew the basic nazis in Czech back story having lived there in the early 90s so I was going to be predisposed to it but what i really liked was the audacious risks the writer took in the narration, I know some will cavil at the self consciousness of it all but that’s not my problem.

HHhH is great. Right when the self awareness starts to get annoying it disappears and you’re left with just the story which is incredibly compelling and doubly so because you know how difficult it was to right. Also lots to ponder re narrative history, historiography etc

Read a bit the other day where I thought "Nah. He must have made this up. It's too theatrical, too cinematic." then the very next page had him detailing how a friend read his manuscript, had the same thought and he'd been frustrated because he hadn't made it up at all. That's the point at which I was really sold on him knowing exactly what he was doing.

 

[shiels]

what did you get from it @jenks?

 

[jenks]

I think what I really liked was the sparseness of the story telling, the use of vernacular without explaining anything, that talking at cross purposes that happens in real conversation and an unsentimental eye for detail. My mate from Cork borrowed it - he loved it, said he could hear the voices ring true. I might well give it a re-read over the holidays.
There’s been a real renaissance in Irish writing in the last few years - obviously not everyone is a fan of Sally Rooney but Kevin Barry, Mike McCormac, Nicole Flattery, Wendy Erskine, David Hayden just off the top of my head have all produced excellent work

 

[shiels]

I loved sally Rooney. Fuck what anyone says. She’s amazing with the unsaid and misunderstandings like you describe there

 

[luka]

"No Digory. Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high is a and lonely destiny."

 

[luka]

"No, I don't believe this wood is a world at all. I believe it's just a sort of in-between place."

 

[jenks]

I thought that might have been Return of the Native with Digory Venn, the riddle man but then I remembered Digory in the Magician’s Nephew. I read them to my kids until they got bored of them. Never finished the series.

 

[IdleRich]

Ah yes. There used to be a column in one of the broadsheets on a Saturday or whatever with a quiz and you had to identify a book from, usually, a few lines that mentioned characters and so on... but it was surprisingly difficult even when you knew you had read the book and the characters' names put it on the tip of your tongue. It was a well designed quiz I guess, good fun.

 

[luka]

I thought that might have been Return of the Native with Digory Venn, the riddle man but then I remembered Digory in the Magician’s Nephew. I read them to my kids until they got bored of them. Never finished the series.

I love the image of the wood between worlds. One of those things which haunt you throughout your life. You absolutely know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is an image which has a real analogue, that it stands in for something that truly exists.

 

[IdleRich]

I love the image of the wood between worlds. One of those things which haunt you throughout your life. You absolutely know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is an image which has a real analogue, that it stands in for something that truly exists.

Definitely this is a common trope, a space in-between worlds that leads to many others through various doors. Sort of like The Magic Faraway Tree I suppose. What else?

 

[IdleRich]

Often watched over by some kind of guardian - possibly wise, possibly malevolent.

 

[luka]

I don't know the magic faraway tree I don't think . I'll look it up

 

[luka]

Oh I wasn't allowed to read Enid Blyton as a child. They said she was a horrible old racist. I had that sort of childhood. Wasn't allowed toy guns either. Or sweets.

 

[IdleRich]

I liked that book a lot, in fact I read a couple or even three of them at my gran's place but later on whenever I went there I could only find one, which was great but I always wanted to read the stories from the other one again. But later I found out one of them was really rare I think. I dunno what happened to it anyway...
But yeah, those kind of portal places are often fraught with danger... of course you can step through the wrong door into a perilous world, but the real issue is that you can become trapped in the in-between and spend eternity in nowhere.

 

[IdleRich]

In modern reprints, the names of some of the characters have been changed. Jo has been changed to Joe, the more common spelling for males, and Bessie is now Beth, the former name having fallen out of usage as a nickname for Elizabeth. Fanny and Dick, whose names now carry unfortunate connotations, have been renamed Frannie and Rick. Dame Slap has become Dame Snap, and no longer practises corporal punishment but instead reprimands her students by shouting at them.
Entire passages of the original have been rewritten to remove references to fighting. For instance, when the tree is taken over by Goblins in The Enchanted Wood, the Goblins were originally fought off, with descriptions of Mr. Watzisname 'pummelling them as if he were beating carpets' and the Saucepan Man throwing his saucepans at them. These have been replaced with cursory references to 'chasing'.

 

[jenks]

Ah yes. There used to be a column in one of the broadsheets on a Saturday or whatever with a quiz and you had to identify a book from, usually, a few lines that mentioned characters and so on... but it was surprisingly difficult even when you knew you had read the book and the characters' names put it on the tip of your tongue. It was a well designed quiz I guess, good fun.

I won £100 of Folio Society vouchers from the Guardian in one of those competitions

 

[Murphy]

Often watched over by some kind of guardian - possibly wise, possibly malevolent.

Your modern gods mean nothing in this part of the woods.

 

[IdleRich]

In Twin Peaks the Black Lodge feels like one of those in-between places and yet is portrayed as an end in itself... maybe that's what makes it extra unsettling, how can such a transitory place be anything? Like in Naked when a lot of it is deliberately shot in doorways, stairway landings, corridors and so on, places you always just rush through on the way to somewhere else.