The days are still very short. I keep being surprised by this, as if I haven’t lived through forty-odd Januaries already. By half three the light is going, and by four it’s gone, and I find myself doing what I always do: pulling the curtain across, switching on the lamp, putting the kettle on for a cup of tea I’ll probably let go cold.
I read four books in December and early January. Not because I’m particularly disciplined about it – I’m not – but because the alternative is sitting in the dark thinking about whether the noise under the Yaris dashboard is getting worse. Books are better. They’re always better in January. There’s something about the weather that suits it, the way the whole world seems to agree to stay indoors.
Nightboat to Tangier
I started Kevin Barry’s Nightboat to Tangier on the twenty-seventh of December, sitting in the armchair closest to the fire with the Stanley range doing its work in the kitchen. I’d had it on the shelf for two years. I don’t know what I was waiting for.
It’s not a long book. I read it in two days, which is fast for me. There were lines in it that I had to stop and sit with for a minute, which isn’t always comfortable – that feeling of having been caught at something. Barry writes about men who are used to being the kind of men they are, and there’s a grief in it that arrives sideways, not front on. By the time I understood what I was reading I was already near the end.
I put it down and stared at the fire for a while. That felt like the right response.
A Line Made by Walking
Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking I’d read before, years ago, but I picked it up again after Christmas because I’d been thinking about it since November when I walked the loop above Anascaul Lake. I couldn’t have told you exactly why. There’s something in how she writes about the countryside – not describing it, exactly, more like recording what it does to a person – that I kept coming back to.
Second readings are different, and I can never decide if they’re better or worse. You know where everything is going. But you notice things you missed the first time: a small detail you’d skimmed past, a sentence that now seems to have been the whole point. I found one of those on page forty-something, about dead things, and I folded the page corner over before I remembered I’d stopped doing that to books.
I made a cup of Barry’s Gold Blend, sat back down, and read the last third in one go. Cold tea on the windowsill when I surfaced. The letters I’d meant to post still there beside it, the ones I’d been carrying since Kenmare in October. I really should deal with those.
Amongst Women
Donal gave me the John McGahern. Not for Christmas – he’d found it in a box when he was clearing out the spare room in Cork, and posted it to me at the start of December. There was a note with it: Think this is yours. Or mine. Either way. Which is Donal all over.
I already owned a copy but mine has the spine held together with faith and habit, so I started into this fresh one. Amongst Women is a book I find very hard to say anything useful about. It does something that I haven’t been able to pin down in twenty years of trying, which is make you feel the weight of a household – the particular heaviness of a house with a difficult man at the centre of it – without ever quite condemning or explaining him. You’re just inside it. The way you might be inside a family that isn’t yours, understanding things you don’t fully have the words for.
I sat with it for four nights. I cried a bit on the third night, which I hadn’t expected, or I’d forgotten to expect. The fire had gone low by the time I finished and I didn’t bother with it, just went to bed with the book still on the armchair.
The fourth one
The fourth book I’m not going to say much about. It was a novel I’d ordered online in November, one of those purchases you make with good intentions and then look at the cover and feel uncertain. It wasn’t bad. It just didn’t take hold, and sometimes that’s enough to know. I read to about page eighty and then put it aside for a few days, and the few days became two weeks, and by that point the moment had passed.
That happens. A book can be perfectly fine and still not be the book for right now. January requires a certain kind of company, and this one wasn’t quite it.
Bríd texted on New Year’s Day to ask what I’d been reading and I told her the Barry and the McGahern. She said she’d read both and that she’d found the McGahern almost too much. I knew what she meant. We have the same argument every few years about whether a book being almost too much is a problem or the whole point. We never agree. We probably won’t.
I’ve started something new this week – off the same shelf, a Niall Williams I’ve been circling for ages. The days are still short. I have time.
No changes were required. The post was already clean against all nine rules: no banned words, em-dash count is within range, no exclamation marks, spellings are Irish/UK throughout, the opening and closing are neither rhetorical nor advisory, Irish English vocabulary sits at a natural level (a handful of light markers without overcrowding), no phrase tics were present, and there is no pull-quote to check.