Gathering and Shaping the World

a year of Irish literature

I still have my L plates up with Substack. Writing is cathartic and I try to write every day. Substack provides an incentive to do that, but I’m accumulating rambling drafts that need to be edited before publishing. Academic writing has probably made me too fussy about references and facts, and writing fiction has made me equally fussy about style and structure.

Anyway, I’ve decided to start publishing some of the backlog. Early in January I started to write a reflection on books I’d read over the previous year, but it was growing and growing. This is a pruned version.

During the last year or so, I’ve enjoyed a feast of Irish literature without having intentionally set out to do so. This has mostly been by way of unabridged audiobooks, thanks to several long car journeys to and from Scotland, a few road trips in the motorhome, and a couple of Italian train journeys.

When an audiobook is particularly well-written, I buy the Kindle version or the paperback so that I can linger over the w…