Peter Costello
Christmas and the New Year are the most important marketing periods for the book trade. The shops are filled, not only with their normal stock, but a flood of special seasonal “present” books, most of which will be of little real interest in a month or so.
To help readers navigate this swamp of printed matter, we are suggesting a selection of books for adults, young adults and children. These are books of real merit and interest, worth reading and also rereading (if that is not nowadays a lost pleasure), with so many demands being made on our time at all the hours of our days and nights). If this year there is a common theme it is to appreciate and help preserve our natural environment, what was once called “God’s creation”…
This Boy’s Heart: Scenes from an Irish Childhood,
by John Creedon
(Gill Books, €24.99)
His television and radio work has made John Creedon a popular figure through his agreeable style. This book is in the same vein, describing his Cork upbringing, the people, scenes and events that made him the character he is. It evokes an almost timeless past, now vanished or vanishing, and will appeal to all who relish the seemingly simpler times of the old days in rural Ireland.
Nature Boy: a Journey of Birdsong and Belonging,
by Seán Ronayne
(Hachette Ireland, €24.99)
This is a book which takes the ornithologist author around the world to many wild places in search of birds and bird song. However behind it all lies a troubled childhood, only much later explained by a diagnosis of autism in his thirties. Again the childhood setting is rural Cork, but from a very unusual angle.
The author links the wonders of bird life with the need to cherish what we still have of all things wild. He brings his readers into a close connection with the very nature of creation.
Drawn to Nature,
by Don Conroy
(Gill Books, €22.99)
On television Don Conroy was a delightful exponent of art for all, especially how to draw and paint the natural world. This book continues this style, for the hints about drawing are certainly here, but the theme of the book is really the author’s own delight in the everyday aspects of nature which he sees around him, the animals, birds, trees and plants from which so many of us are sealed away from in our cars and quite blind to. It is a joy to turn the pages, and to savour the art work. Would suit any reader over the age of ten for many summers to come.
Charlotte,
by Martina Devlin
(Lilliput Press, €16.95)
The fascination with the creative and often stressed family at Haworth Rectory continues. Here writer Martina Devlin uses her skill as a writer and her expertise as a literary scholar to explore the perennial fascinating figure of Charlotte Bronte, her father and siblings. The wide spread of her own books reveals an unseal experience of life and society, which is brought to bear on exploring the psychology of a creative figure who had always attracted a wide range of very different readers. A book to put on the shelf beside Daphne du Maurier’s alternative view of Haworth, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte.
A Place called Home,
by Alice Taylor, with photographs by Emma Byrne
(O’Brien Books, €19.99)
Christmas would not be Christmas without another helping of her continuing life by the delightful but also insightful Alice Taylor. She has charmed countless readers over the decades with her accounts of her life, mostly passed at Innishannon in Cork, now a greatly changed place since she first knew it. Her readers have in the past found her a heart warming read, and reminded that at the heart of things there is an essential goodness apparent to those who seek it.
The Irish Words You Should Know: and how to start using them again,
by Hector Ó hEochagain
(Gill Books, €22.99)
Though it was striking during the recent election campaign that Irish language posters were not much in evidence, there are still those who wish to encourage a greater knowledge and appreciation of the first language of the nation. Though millions have been poured into efforts at revival they have not carried the matter very far. And yet for anyone at all interested in Irish life and culture the appeal and the nature of Irish is an appealing one. This book, aimed at all lovers and potential lovers of the language, will have an immediate appeal. The character of the Irish language is certainly more essentially poetic than English all too often is. Here that appeal is explored for all.
To go with it there is also
Gaeilige i Mo Chroí: Irish in My Heart, Your Guide to Loving and Living the Irish Language,
by Molly Nic Céile
(Hachette Books Ireland, €17.99)
The author is already a fixture in the social media universe – which seems increasingly to be the way to become that very old fashioned thing, the author of a book – and is hoping to encourage a daily use of Irish, whatever you may have felt about it at school. Indeed, it has often been observed that the worst enemies of the Irish language are the teachers and grammarians who have beset it for centuries. This book may even make the language seem fun.
A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne,
text by Robert O’Byrne
(Messenger Publications , €25.00)
Abandoned Ireland 2,
by Rebecca Brownlie
(Merrion Press , €24.99)
The two books represent the halves of the same story. The celebrated Jesuit photographer Fr Francis Browne was in his own day well known to his many friends as an adept and accomplished photographer, who had a special arrangement with Kodak to provide him with free film stock those days before everyone with a telephone was turned into a “citizen journalist”.
Over the decades since his store of highly flammable negatives were rescued and safely archived by Davison Photography his photos have become familiar through a series of books, of which this is the latest. He records the country houses of Ireland, some of which were, of course, Catholic residences in their glorious heyday.
By contrast the equally atmospheric photographs of Rebecca Brownlie, a Co Down photographer who has been a passionate photographer since the age of twelve. This is her second book on the theme of Ireland’s abandoned buildings, not just great mansions indeed, but any kind of edifice, cottages, and shops business. She captures extraordinary scenes of a world where people just vanished (as indeed they were claimed to have done from one of the mansions she records). Gothic, macabre and astonishing all at the same time.
Kevin and the Blackbirds,
by David Almond
and illustrated by
P. J. Lynch
(Walker Books, €14.99)
A charming version of the traditional tales from early Christian Ireland, one of many touching animal tales involving Celtic saints. These saints though they lived a difficult and often penitential life, cherish their relations with the natural world around them. They could see the hand of God in so much that we ignore today. In this tale the young monk Kevin, so absorbed in his own prayers, allows a blackbird to lay her eggs in a nest made in his cupped hands. The work of an established duo, this is a book to cherish.
The Great Irish Biodiversity Books,
by Eanna Ni Lamhna
and illustrated by Barry Falls
(Gill Books, €24.99)
The author, who has worked with An Taisce and the Tree Council of Ireland, is a skilled communicator of facts about Irish natural history as shown in several previous books. Here she covers a great deal of ground with her illustrator. This is a book for young people between nine and fifteen or so. It will lead them back to her earlier books, enlarging their knowledge at a time when the threat of climate change is ever growing.
Usually a sample of books from Veritas are included in these Christmas lists.
But this year Veritas, the long established Abbey Street book shop and publisher owned by the Irish bishops, will close at year›s end. It will be missed by many. It also had shops elsewhere in the country: those in Derry and Letterkenny have already closed.
But in Dublin they are now holding a closing down sale where many books of great value and interest can be bought at discounted prices.
It may mark the end of an era, but for readers it may also start them on the way to a new life, through what they buy in the sale, which is not only of books and pamphlets, but also repository items, and even clerical clothes and vestments.