graphic novels

I love the long, warm, bright summer evenings - but the long, chilly, dark winter evenings have their charms too, as long as I have something good to read. The girls in my house have stored up some special reads for those lazy days between Christmas and New Year. We've had to banish the chosen books from sight so we're not tempted to start reading immediately - there lies grave danger of no present buying, pudding making, tree trimming or other essential ingredients of Christmas. Read more »

Have you ever speculated which books you would bring with you to a desert island? (I've always thought that should be 'deserted' not 'desert' but perhaps it's an obscure grammar point I don't get?) As part of the Re Think + Re Act Exhibition, Pivot Dublin have set up a Reading Room in Filmbase in Temple Bar, Dublin. They invited readers in Dublin to submit their favourite book to be displayed in the Reading Room during the exhibition. 

My choice? 

The three girls in my family got together to raid our groaning bookshelves and share our favourite books with Dubliners at the Reading Room. Come along and see if you can find them. Read more »

Once derided as a literary medium for 'children and the simple-minded', comic books or graphic novels have become a respected and respectable literary genre in their own right. Any condescension seems to be a peculiarly Anglo/Hiberno prejudice as comics are fully incorporated into the literary heritage of many countries, most notably the USA, Japan, and France. Things seem to be changing here in Ireland with noted writers such as Peter Murphy and Kevin Barry championing the format as well as a small but vibrant domestic scene (which shall be the subject of a future blog).

Graphic novels are prohibitively expensive to buy but Dublin City Public Libraries has an excellent collection for both children and adults. The following selection is largely aimed at the adult reader taking their first exploratory steps into a format they may have ignored since their days of reading The Beano and The Dandy. Explore and enjoy. Read more »

I was intending to post this earlier this week, and then I got larangitis and my doctor determined that I needed rest, so here's part 2 of my 2011 favourites.  Fiction, of a more adult nature, post 1 was Non-Fiction and post 3 will be Young Adult and Children's

I read a lot of books over the last year, approximately 290 of which I noted from the library.

Of all the books I read from the library some stood out, I couldn't pick a small number but I'm going to put them into themes and pick the best of that theme.  Sometimes it's hard to pick just one, the first listed is my favourite, the rest are in no particular order.  This isn't a definitive list, it's a list of books that are readable alone or are the start of a series, that I read during 2011, that stood out above the others and that I would recommend to others. Read more »