Not only Alstair Campbell's Diaries (which are superb) but Fr Michael Seed's harrowing account of his childhood, The Worlock Archive, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini's self-serving account of the The Reform of the Liturgy (hardback, shrink-wrapped, and only £6), and out of the blue, courtesy of a friend, Fiorella de Maria's unputdownable "Father William's Daughter".
SWMBO has been laid low by a virus, and hasn't noticed more than the odd box from Amazon: four 900-pagers from Neal Stephenson mean nine new books.
And it was Louis MacNeice's hundredth birthday a couple of day's ago: "a cat who walked by himself"; and I have been reading the Autumn Journal.
"Why do we like being Irish? Partly because
It gives us a hold on the sentimental English
As members of a world that never was,
Baptised with fairy water;
And partly because Ireland is small enough
To be still thought of with a family feeling."
I love blogging, and the Internet, but as long as you'd allow me e-mail, I'd choose books first, every time.
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3 comments:
As I value your opinion,I do hope you review at length your current reading material via this blog. I am myself a hopeless reader of prose.
I don't know that I'll have time to do a review at length of Alastair Campbell: but the two episodes that he recounts which I was involved in are recounted exactly in accordance with my memory of them, which makes me think that the whole book must be as accurate: in which case here is a really accurate description of Blair's Primeministership.
Reading Fr Seed's book, I realised that I knew him vaguely in the mid-1970s and ...
there isn't time! But I will post on Fiorella's book when I've finished it: it isn't just a racy thriller, or a conundrum-style detective novel; it's got something else.
(The book about Worlock and Bugnini's are a penance: you have to understand where the Pope's Catholic enemies get their ideas from.)
The Stephenson books are for my next intercontinental flights.
Nobody who reads poetry is incapable of reading prose: it takes longer, and it's harder to work out what the writer is getting at, but it's worth the struggle.
i wish Fr Seed would spare us the details!
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