I have to confess that I do prefer to read fantasy fiction most of all, but I have read other genre too and this cache explores some of my favourite books. At the very top of the list is my favourite book of all time ‘The Lord of the Rings’, by J. R. R. Tolkien. I read it over 40 years ago, long before the current spate of movies began, but I am an eclectic reader and quite enjoyed other books too at that time.
I read a spate of Russian novels, some are heavy going but I loved Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I’ve read popular Gogol, Tolstoy & Pushkin works and some lesser known titles such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s For the Good of the Cause. I also read and enjoyed The Idiot featuring Prince Myshkin, by my favourite Russian writer Dostoyevsky.
I am hard pressed to choose an all time Irish favourite book/character but if I had to then it would have be Ulysses by James Joyce featuring Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom. Less well known would be Troubles, with Sarah Devlin, for which JG Farrell won the Lost Man Booker Prize, but there are simply too many excellent Irish authors to fit into one cache. I like Irish Poetry and Patrick Kavanagh was one of our best poets and he was quite the great novelist too, as I found out when I read the eponymous Tarry Flynn.
She was destitute when she wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone but J. K. Rowling alongside her Hogwart’s magicians (my fav was Professor Minerva McGonagall) were spell bounding for her finances and, to boot, she gave us our ‘muggles’. More on the fantasy magical theme now because I loved reading about Fiver, Bigwig and Silver in Watership Down, the Richard Adams classic published in 1972.
As I wrote about J.K.R I remembered another Irish book, a weird and wonderful ‘meta’ fiction novel starring Pooka MacPhellimey and written by Flann O'Brien. This odd style of writing was unusual for its time as the work is pre WW2, in 1939, but it remains a terrific example of the genre and is quirkily called "At Swim Two Birds".
Slightly more serious subject matter now, with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a superb Russian read, written by none other than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from as recently as 1962. As we approach Halloween what could be more appropriate, finally, than a mention of our own Bram Stoker’s classic "Dracula" from 1897.
**Congratulations to 'theswerve' for FTF**