2015 books: 17-20

[the_siobhan]

After all the Canadiana I moved on to the Irish. Might as well have all the cultural influences represented here.


    

Trinity by Leon Uris I first read this when I was just a kid filching books from my father's library. I'm not sure how old I was but I remember that we lived on Kingston Rd, so it was prior to grade 6. The book takes place in Northern Ireland in the late 1800's, early 1900's. England is sucking Ireland dry and manipulating the Presbyterian population to keep the Catholics terrorized. The hero is a man named Conor Larkin who is a MANLY MANLY MAN and a hero of the revolution, all the men look up to him and all the (WOMANLY WOMANLY) women want him, etc, etc, blah blah blah. Trinity was my first exposure to what happened in Ireland and he does his research well, so the events of the story still makes for an entertaining read. The actual writing itself didn't age well, however. He uses too many exclamation points to denote excitement and I just cannot read text with elipses; they drive me bonkers. Also, Uris can't write a love scene to save his life.

    

Redemption by Leon Uris Ours appears to be a very literate neighbourhood. Besides the three small libraries (and a forth being built) there is usually at least one house a week with a box full of books sitting on their front walk. One day one of them had a big stack of books about Ireland and Irish people and I scooped up about 10 of them. So Redemption was one of those books. In theory it's a sequel to Trinity and it picks up where news of Conor Larkin's death reaches his family in New Zealand. I could not finish this book. All the things that bugged me about Trinity are dialed up to 11 here - the use of exclamation points and CAPITAL LETTERS to denote emotion, the banging on about the manly manliness of the characters (and the womanly womanliness of the womanly women who fall for them) until it was actually painful to read. When I got about a quarter of the way in he started re-writing some of the incidents that happened in Trinity to ret-con the original story and that was me done. I chucked it.

    

The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey This one actually takes place in Australia, but the background of the book is about the poor Irish settlers who are exploited by corrupt police. Ned Kelly grows up seeing his family and neighbours continually jailed and abused and their possessions seized. (Boy, that's not relevent to current events, is it?) He eventually runs afoul of a cop who is after his sister and he ends up an outlaw along with his brother and a couple of friends in the same boat. The last book I read by Carey was Bliss, which I adored. This book is written very differently - it's a series of letters written by Kelly to his infant daughter, so since he is only half literate the text is very simple and colloquial. Carey doesn't pretend this is a factual account, and the story he writes is of a man who probably would have been a successful boxer or farmer or pretty much anything if he had been born at a different time.

    

1949: A Novel of the Irish Free State by Morgan Llewellyn This is an odd book. It's about Ireland and Irish politics in the first half of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of a young Irish Republican woman. It's the history that gets most of the attention here - the main character definitely comes in second. She is the female parallel to the Conor Larkin of Trinity; independant, strong-minded, courageous and able to buck both her religion and the social conventions of the day. Of course all the men fall hopelessly in love with her but she is married only to her country, etc. She feels rather flat, but really she's just a device to tell the story of what was happening in Ireland at the time and that's an interesting enough story to carry the book by itself.

So since I don't really live under a rock, I have of course heard of all the fuss about the challenge to read only books by authors who are not white, cis, or male for a year. I wasn't planning on partipating until I had finished the Get Rid of Books Project, but it did make me wonder what my stats would look like if I were paying attention.

I have read a total of 20 books so far this year.

10 of them are by 6 women

9 of them are by 6 men. Of those men, one is gay, one Native and one Jewish.

One book is a compilation of short stories by men and women of various backgrounds.
If I leave out the short stories the math is easier and I'm all about the easy so I'm going to say that the straight, white, het, cis men ratio is about 25%.

There's no point to all this, I was just curious.

Comments

[greylock]

There's no point to all this, I was just curious.
So, you're saying it's not about ethics in book-reading? :)


Arguably, you are the first person I know who has read Leon Uris.
I figured he was Jewish, for no real reason.
I also figured he wrote big, bloated crap spy novels in the '80s.
I am not sure I am incorrect.
I also think I might hate him because of a cover, which involved an eye being held open by matchsticks.

I am even less aware of Peter Carey, and have no idea if the Kelly Gang story is even remotely accurate. I expect partly, but Ned Kelly's a bit of a folk hero here, for reasons. But I think the worst bits of Australia have adopted him as a hero.

[the_siobhan]

There was a point where I was reading a lot of books that were more about setting and history than plot and character. I was reading a lot of Uris back then, so I file him in the same category as authors like James A. Michener and Arthur Hailey. Good for movie ideas I guess.