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Showing posts with the label Northern Ireland

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 also has scheduled various Irish books to read this year. 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 source novel’s author, William Trevor, has been pretty well off my radar all my life.

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Body-text fonts, pt. 41: Aldus

If you’re an Irish novelist publishing a masterpiece, c. 2017–2018, chances are, it’ll be typeset with Hermann Zapf’s Aldus.

Exhibit A (Sally Rooney):


Exhibit B (Anna Burns):


Edoarda & Stephen have returned from Dublin, Aberdeen, and Shetland (where Edoarda took grant-funded knitting lessons). I told Stephen I wanted a tree from Shetland; failing that, a jar of jellied eels, although that’s more of a Londoners’ food; failing that, a tabloid. Stephen found no trees, eels, or tabloids on Shetland. He did bring the July 4 issue of the Shetland Times. Front-page news: “Ponies Draw Crowds from Afar”; “Council Spends £2.4m on Agency Staff for Ferries.” The body text (Miller) is the smallest I’ve seen in any newspaper.
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