'Stand By Me' is the only song with its own fan club. It's true. There's a whole group of people who scour the world for different versions of the song and have meetings where they play newly discovered versions, discuss the lyrics and drink a toast to Ben E. King.
pickBook #18 of 2025: “Clare Folk Tales” from Ruth Marshall
It‘s nice to have an easy, fun book every now and then! I liked this little collection of folk tales specifically about County Clare in Ireland. It‘s very well researched but without being academic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDWZEzT1CTs
Intro
Mystery guest
Weekly highlights
Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig
About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler
Though the Bodies Fall by Noel O'Regan
Resonances
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaza Weddings: A Novel by Ibrahim Nasrallah
Birdeye by Judith Heneghan
The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood
...etc
pickThis is a haunting, lyrical story set on the Irish Kerry cliffs. Micheál, a reluctant guardian of a suicide blackspot, inherits his late mother‘s grim duty of watching and intervening when he can.
Torn between family estrangement, personal grief, and the suffocating pull of home, Micheál‘s silence speaks volumes. I‘ll be thinking of this for a while.
A joke:
How do you know when there's a bodhran player at your front door?
The knocking gets faster and faster.
And there's a woman climbing over chairs, taking pictures of every conceivable object at every conceivable angle...so she's obviously American.
He's upset a few along the way too, as does anyone willing to put their head above the fray.
pickDamning account of how the English government suppressed Ireland's economy for centuries, then victim blamed them when the famine happened and mostly refused to help. Lots of quotes from respected English officials expressing anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry and occasionally coming right out and publicly stating the famine was a fortuitous way to bring down the unsustainable population. Good but long and repetitive.
pickOh wow! I loved this. The backstage at the theatre stuff is great and the family stuff is even better. Some of the scenes between the family members felt to me like scenes from a play. The dialogue is really, really good. And I loved the Uncle Vanya references. I‘ll be looking out for Elaine Garvey‘s next book.
First book completed for #14books14weeks
