Preview: Irish reading

Here is my list of Irish people to read in 2026–2027. (And afterward.)

Who’m I overlooking?

• John Banville, a.k.a. Benjamin Black
• Samuel Beckett
• Elizabeth Bowen
• Anna Burns
• Joyce Cary
• Erskine Childers (Mayfair-born)
• Roddy Doyle
• Maria Edgeworth
• J. G. Farrell
• Tara French
• Seamus Heaney
• James Joyce
• Claire Keegan
• C. S. Lewis
• Brian Moore
• Iris Murdoch
• Edna O’Brien
• Flann O’Brien
• Sally Rooney
• George Bernard Shaw
• Jonathan Swift
• J. M. Synge
• William Trevor
• Oscar Wilde
• Cecil Woodham-Smith (Welsh-born, Irish-sired)
• William Butler Yeats

I’ve read, or at least tried to read, all of these people but Bowen, Cary, Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Synge, and Trevor. I wouldn’t mind trying out everybody on the list.

I’m leaving Franks McCourt and O’Connor off the list. For now.

I also want to read a history book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. (Woodham-Smith’s Great Famine also is a work of history.)

My mother-in-law has scheduled various Irish books to read. Amazingly, nothing on her list is on mine.

The idea for this project came from viewing Atom Egoyan’s excellent, unsettling Felicia’s Journey (1999) and reflecting that the novel’s author, William Trevor, has been pretty well off my radar all my life.

Prolongation of woe

I.e., puking. Only Abel has been spared. We’ve brought the TV upstairs so as to get to the toilet promptly. Karin gallantly has been letting the children use the toilet first. She makes due in the hallway with her bucket.

Daniel, poor boy, is on his second cycle with this bug, having been symptomless one glorious week.

I’m well enough right now. I dread the second cycle.

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I’m teaching Samuel how footnotes work, using Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs. He’ll grow up thinking that studying history is fun.

Other reading:

• François Mauriac, A Kiss for the Leper (a mini-book)
• Voltaire, Candide (a re-read; a mini-book)
• N. T. Wright, God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

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R.I.P. Chuck Norris, aged eighty-six. And Robert Mueller.

Body-text fonts, pt. 49: ITC Garamond

The Iranians are trying to have their World Cup games moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

Good. Luck.

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Six-year-old Samuel, whom we don’t allow to use social media, has been talking about giving up social media for a week. 🙄

Not for Lent’s sake. For a Klondike bar. (“What would you do for a Klondike bar?”)

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Chubby ITC Garamond is this month’s typeface. (This link is to the darker version, and this link is to the lighter version.)

My children are less “Charlie Bucket,” more “Mike Teavee.”

Oscars

Viewing the ceremony – not comprehensively – after a multi-year hiatus. (Oscar-cast doubles as storm alerter tonight.)

I’m old enough now to be less concerned with the living than with the honored dead:

• Robert Duvall
• Graham Greene
• Diane Keaton
• Val Kilmer
• Robert Redford
• Rob Reiner
• Terence Stamp, etc.

(Some heavy hitters.)

Of the nominated movies, I’ve seen Sinners. Delroy Lindo, who plays a tragicomical virtuouso drunk (Cat Ballou’s Lee Marvin, anyone?), lost his contest to Sean Penn but would have been a worthy laureate.

And I’ve seen KPop Demon Hunters: unworthy but, tonight, triumphant.

Paul Thomas Anderson will win, one year or another (probably this year); and so will Jessie Buckley, who’s too good to feature in what gets made nowadays. She’s acted with Olivia Colman, which yields dividends, Oscar-wise. I’d like to see Jessie win for something schlocky like Beast or Men. (Or for a Richard Linklater adaptation of Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man.) Not for a prestige picture about one of Shakespeare’s love interests (everybody wins for that).

It’s been a grueling weekend. Daniel puked, I puked, and now Samuel has just puked. Three of us down, two of us to go.

Paul’s bedtime reading

Iran’s team has withdrawn from the World Cup. The newspapers are taking it in stride.

Surely, I’m not the only dismayed soccer follower in the West?

Update (March 13): The team has not withdrawn (or been ousted).

I’ll let you know when I know what I’m talking about.

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The war’s death toll has risen. And it’s beyond doubt that the U.S. killed those schoolchildren.

Update: I really hope the news about something so important is beyond doubt.

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I’ve also updated my unchangeable and definite reading list of the next two months. I’ll try to finish not five, not ten, but twenty-four more books before the late-April conclusion of my 2025–2026 cycle. And so it’s particularly cruel of the Web bots to pepper me with ads for the new John Galsworthy PBS show. I just can’t fit all nine of those novels into the schedule. If only Abel didn’t cling to me all day long.

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Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness – he had read a rather daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject – but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.

Frankly, Paul Pennyfeather’s life sounds lovely (except for that ominous bit about “incalculable consequences”).

The good news is, the Forsyte show looks missable.