Summer Reading List

The English Department, St Columba’s College, Dublin 16, Ireland

Reading Recommendations for Parents, Summer 2010 Dear Parents,

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e in the English Department are resurrecting an old idea at the end of this term. After spending the academic year doing our best to enthuse your children about literature, we thought you might like a little attention too. So what follows in these pages is a list of recommended reading for the summer, mostly of recently-published books, as well as a few old favourites. Most are fiction. Our only guideline was that they should all be readily available in paperback. An asterisk* indicates that there is also a fuller review on our SCC English blog, www.sccenglish.ie. As with previous summers, there will be occasional further summer reading recommendations on the blog.

As for the children, we do of course spend a lot of time encouraging them to read, and the summer is the best opportunity of all to do so. There are reading lists available for junior pupils on the blog, under ‘Department Documents’, if you should wish to explore further.

We’ve avoided the standard best-sellers: there’s plenty of bite and no fluff in this list. We can’t guarantee that you’ll like these books, just that one or more of us did.

Happy reading, and enjoy the summer.

Julian Girdham, Liam Canning, Evan Jameson, Kate Smith, Ronan Swift, Tom McConville (Librarian). .

* The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker (Flamingo, 2009).

“I’ve put father upstairs.” So starts an extraordinary and haunting book, set in contemporary Holland on a farm near Amsterdam. The narrator, Helmer von Wonderen, lives on a farm with his aged father. Years ago his twin brother Henk died in a car crash, and now his life starts to change after years of stagnancy, with the return of Henk’s girlfriend Riet, accompanied by her teenage son (also called Henk). The Twin is told in a very spare way.

Entirely gripping, you won’t be able to get it out of your thoughts. Last week, it rightly won the 2010 IMPAC Award.

* Love and Summer by William Trevor (Penguin, 2009) Just out in paperback, Love and Summer is the latest novel from the best-known Old Columban writer (we celebrated his 80th birthday two years ago with a talk and exhibition).

Only 212 pages long, it shows Trevor at his most poignant. Another vivid exploration of time and place, in its emotional wisdom, narrative drive, structural elegance and beautiful prose it outstrips most modern fiction.

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor (Penguin, 2002) Our second Trevor recommendation: if your son or daughter is in this or next year’s VI form, you will know that he/she has been studying this novel. The story is beautifully told in an elegant arc. It is about a life that moves from childhood tragedy to adult reconciliation. If you can predict what will happen to Lucy Gault over the decades that Trevor covers, you’re more perceptive than the English Department. It’s difficult to count how many moving moments there are in this novel.

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (Penguin, 1947; new translation 2009).

This English edition, with a new translation by Michael Hofmann, has been an enormous and surprising publishing success over the recent months (the German title translates as Every Man Dies Alone). It tells the story of lower-class resistance to Hitler’s regime, and is based on the true story of a couple who protested against their government by dropping inflammatory postcards around the city for two years. It offers an extremely vivid portrait of Berlin during the War. Written in a frenetic 24 days, it is not a perfect novel, but it is full of powerful scenes, and builds to a powerful climax. In the Penguin edition there is an interesting appendix about Fallada’s extraordinary life (his real name was Rudolph Ditzen, and he died shortly after finishing Alone in Berlin, in 1947).

A Question of Belief by Donna Leon (William Heinemann, 2010).

If you haven’t discovered the Inspector Brunetti series set in Venice, then a huge treat is ahead of you. Brunetti is not the hard-bitten, alcoholic loner detective of cliché: instead, he is a classics-reading, empathetic Venetian native who is happily married to a university professor (whose favourite author is Henry James). The other great character of these novels (this is 19th in the series) is Venice; the city is a palpable, vivid and memorable presence in each book. Leon seems to becoming better and better, and often tackles interesting contemporary issues. The first novel was Death at La Fenice, a good place to start for a summer of treats.

* The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer (Faber and Faber, 2009).

Set in 1953 in San Francisco, this shares some of the atmosphere of the great TV series Mad Men (which is set at the start of the 60s, when change is more obviously in the air in America). It's a short novel, but packs a lot into its 233 pages. Narrated by housewife (and mother of a polio-stricken son) Pearlie, it hits us with two revelations in the first section, one which comes as no great surprise, and a second which is a real shocker. The interplay of these two complications drives the story, which evokes 1950s San Francisco expertly. The novel opens ‘We think we know the ones we love’, a sentence repeated periodically through the novel, and the elegant twists and turns of the narrative constantly re-enact this idea.

* The Spare Room by Helen Garner (Penguin, 2009).

This is not an emotionally easy read. It is both spare and unsparing. It is a very short novel, but is all the more resonant and effective for its laser-like concentration on the see-sawing emotions of the central character, a 60-ish Australian journalist called Helen. She volunteers to look after Nicola, an extrovert and eccentric friend who is desperately ill with cancer and has turned to a series of medical charlatans for a cure. Helen agrees to put her up for three weeks; it turns out to be much harder than she expects to put up with her. This novel is good about many things - the dependencies of friendship and caring, the strengths and weaknesses of an older woman, the city of Melbourne, food and drink. It is full of both rawly intense moments and light funny ones. It is beautifully controlled, despite its grim subject-matter.

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Shakespeare: the world as a stage by Bill Bryson (Harper Perennial, 2008).

There is nothing original in this brief biography, but if you want to know more about the life of the man whose works your children all study at St Columba’s, then it is a very accessible way to start. It is also a good survey of the – mostly loopy – theories about Shakespeare’s life. He writes: ‘it cannot be emphasized too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person.’ As you would expect from Bryson, this is a most engaging read.

The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale (Fourth Estate, 2009).

This contemporary English novelist is always interesting, and has a solid record of very readable novels and short stories. His most recent novel tells the story of Laura and Ben, once lovers, who after many years apart meet again (in Winchester, which along with Cornwall is a regular background to Gale’s fiction). He skilfully constructs his story around the phases of a single day. Look also at his novels such as Rough Music, Pictures at an Exhibition and Friendly Fire (set in an English public school).

One Day by David Nicholls (Hodder, 2010).

You wonder why no-one thought of this simple idea before: the story of one day (July 15th) in the lives of two individuals (Emma and Dexter) from 1988 to 2007. They met on the night of their university graduation, and the novel tells the story of how their lives are intertwined for the next 20 years. It is consistently funny, before it moves to a darker and moving finale.

Memoir by John McGahern (Faber, 2006).

A truly great autobiography by McGahern, who died in 2006. Written with his characteristic grace, this is a book about an Ireland long gone. He writes with joy about both Leitrim (read the first two pages about the fields and the lanes of that county) and his beloved mother. The pages about his father are very different. Andrew Motion wrote rightly that ‘In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye.’

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, 2005).

An extraordinary re-flowering and re-development of a novelist’s career. Six years ago Atkinson started a series featuring Jackson Brodie, a vividly-drawn private eye. The novels are not predictable classic detective fiction: instead, they weave comedy and darker qualities with terrific skill in plots that will often make you laugh out loud. Each book has a large cast of memorable characters. Ideally, read the series in order: the second and third novels are One Good Turn: a jolly murder mystery (2006) and When Will There be Good News? (2009), and a new one comes out this summer: Started Early, Took My Dog.

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill (Granta, 2009) This is a rare sound indeed in a memoir: the voice of a 91-year old woman, entirely lucid, strong-minded and wise. Athill used to work in publishing, and has found a late blossoming as an author, with writings such as Stet, Instead of a Letter, and After a Funeral. In this book, a series of short chapters meditates on the nature of old age, love, friendship, religion and lots more. The Spectator magazine had it right: ‘Her eye is unflinching, her prose as clear and graceful as ever; her honesty is inspiring.’

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The Vagrants by Yiyun Li (Fourth Estate, 2009) Teacher Gu awakes on the morning of his daughter’s execution for being an ‘unrepentant counterrevolutionary’. It is late 1970s China in a provincial town. He is philosophical - he can only deal with this great disorder by becoming even more orderly. “Think of today as the day we pay everything off,” he says to his weeping wife. “The whole debt.” “What debt? What do we owe?” his wife demands and he winces at the unfamiliar shrillness in her voice. The power in this book lies in its understated tone, its matter-of-factness. A range of characters coalesce around the fact of Gu Shan’s execution, her dislikeable life, the despoiling of her body before and after her death. Some protest against the execution, some exploit it, for some it is merely the backdrop to their continuing struggle. Conservatism and poverty vie with individual needs. Overall a blank uncaring dictatorship in the name of the people serves only itself, and makes vagrants of all its people through uncertainty. Yet the only truly humane characters in the book, Old Hua and Mrs Hua, are genuine vagrants.

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (Vintage, 2006) The story of the book itself is fascinating (it is told at the end of this edition): a highly successful French novelist (of Ukrainian birth) before the war, Némirovsky died in Auschwitz (she was Jewish). She left behind the manuscript of this book, which her daughter only opened 50 years later. Astonishingly, it was a masterpiece: an extraordinary evocation of French life in the War, mostly in two novellas, ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Sweet’.

The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland (Bloomsbury, 2008) A young Russian archivist, whose job it is to destroy, not conserve, works of literature, is handed the last writings of the great author Isaac Babel, who is a prisoner in Lubyanka prison. Pavel Dubrov, a disgraced teacher whose wife has been killed in a train accident, and whose mother is losing her mind, is concerned with memory and the importance of human testimony, of human relationships, in the face of an overwhelming state. This small book in a minor key details the perils of his adherence to the necessity of truth between individuals, of trust, as a totalitarian state with implacably mad logic simultaneously purges its own people and lurches towards war.

Dirt Music by Tim Winton (Picador, 2008) We like Tim Winton. The blog has reviewed and recommended his work in the past (see reviews online on *Breath and his outstanding short story collection *The Turning) but here's a gentle push towards his novel Dirt Music. As ever the scorched landscape of Western Australia and the vast Indian Ocean are more than just a backdrop to the lives of his characters. The search for companionship and love by some fairly damaged individuals is beautifully achieved.

Passage to Juneau: a sea and its meaning by Jonathan Raban (Picador, 1999) Another west coast, this time from Washington state to Canada and on to Alaska.

When the author undertook this northerly coast-hugging voyage alone he could never have realised just how much his life would change by its end. Part travel book, part history of the pioneering sailors who explored Canada’s west coast, this is an elegantly written meditation on the sea and on the journeys we take that affect our lives.

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Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan (Faber and Faber, 2007) Julius Winsome leads a solitary life in the woods of New England. He asks only of life that he be left alone with his books and his terrier, Hobbes. Hobbes is wonderful: “he was a dog run through with happiness, for they lead short lives and have an extra sense for each passing moment.

They eat with all their hearts, they play with all their hearts, they sleep with all their hearts.”

One day Hobbes is shot, and when Winsome determines it was deliberate - there are undertones of a love affair, and territory and ownership and language - he wreaks his revenge.

“I didn’t have feeling where I should and too much where I shouldn’t. You keep away from men like me and you’ll be all right in life,” he means to tell his foe, “but it never came up.” A chilling dissertation on sniping in snowbound woods follows, but we never lose sight of Winsome in the midst of his tragedy.

How Many Miles to Babylon? by Jennifer Johnston (Penguin, 1974/1988) Another book that many of your children have studied or will be studying as part of their Leaving Certificate course. It is short and powerful: starting in 1914, it tells the story of Alec, only son of a landed Anglo-Irish couple in County Wicklow. In his childhood, he meets Jerry, a boy from a very different background, and their friendship develops. The second half of the book is set in the trenches in the War. Their relationship comes under tragic pressure.

Johnston’s writing is taut; she is particularly good with dialogue.

What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn (Tindal Street Press, 2007) “Crime was out there. Undetected, unseen. She hoped she wouldn't be too late.” Our detective from Falcon Investigations is Kate, a 10 year-old heading for her daily holiday surveillance shift at the new local Green Oaks Shopping Centre. Together with her assistant Mickey the Monkey (who she made from a Charlie Chimp the Gangster craft kit), she keeps an eye on the centre's customers, staff, shops, banks ... What Was Lost is both very funny and very moving. Catherine O'Flynn captures perfectly the ferocious seriousness of childhood, and the heart-breaking emotional void below this child's detective role-playing.

And now for some older favourites: Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis (Eland, 1978/2002) Subtitled An intelligence officer in the Italian labyrinth, this is probably the best book by an underrated author. Lewis led a long and fascinating life (if you are interested in more, there is an excellent biography called Semi-Invisible Man by Julian Evans, 2008). In 1944 Lewis, having been part of the Allied invasion of Italy, found himself in one of the world’s great cities at one of its lowest moments. The result was this memoir, a brilliantly-written and often very funny evocation of ‘the most wretched city in war-torn Europe.’ As Martha Gellhorn wrote, this is ‘the real thing, pure gold’.

* Troubles by J.G.Farrell (Phoenix, 1970/1993).

Last month the Man Booker Prize ran a ‘Lost Booker’ award for the year 1970 (when the competition was not run), and this outstanding novel was the deservedly clear winner. It is set in the appalling and ironically-named ‘Majestic’ hotel in County Wexford during the War of Independence. The central character, an English ex-soldier called Major Brendan Archer, cannot help but get drawn into the bizarre life of the hopelessly run, dilapidated and catinfested institution. Extremely funny, it is also a fascinating portrait of Ireland at a crucial moment in its history.

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And here are three of literature’s greatest novels to get your teeth into: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (several publishers & translators, 1880) It has been described as ‘a passionate philosophical novel that explores deep into the ethical debates of God, free will and morality’. But don't let that put you off: The Brothers Karamazov is, first and foremost, a brilliant murder mystery story full of twisted and cantankerous characters: lecherous Fyodor, dissolute Dmitri, spiky Ivan and the utterly bonkers Grushenka. One read of this book will reassure you that you are quite normal and well-adjusted.

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (several publishers, 1881).

James’s style isn’t to everyone’s taste, but try out the first (beautiful, lush, languorous) pages of this truly great novel, and if you like them you’re in for a massive summer treat. It tells the story of young fresh American Isabel Archer, and the turns her life takes as she visits Europe late in the nineteenth century. It opens in England, and then moves to a superbly evoked Florence, but the deepest parts of the book are in Isabel’s mind.

You can also listen to the former and present Heads of our Department discussing the novel on a podcast on SCC English on June 18th 2009.

Persuasion by Jane Austen (several publishers, 1816) Austen’s best-known (and frequently-filmed) novels are Pride and Prejudice and Emma, but for a slightly different taste try this, her final book. It has an emotionally autumn tinge: Anne Wentworth fell in love with Captain Wentworth when she was a young woman. She was persuaded that this was an unsuitable match. She is still unmarried as we start the story, and headed for the shelf (at 27!) when he comes back into her life. As always there is much humour; in her last book (she died a year after its publication, aged 41), there is also much that is deeply moving.

Finally, we can hardly leave out our own book:Outside the Frame: selected writings from the SCC English blog, 2008-2010 Published last month, this 165-page book collects the best writing by pupils and staff on SCC English over the last two years, and follows the same format as our 2008 publication Going Places. There are short stories, essays, poems, lots of book recommendations, Christmas memories, interviews and more. It is illustrated with photographs and drawings from pupils, and is beautifully-printed by www.lulu.com, with fine cover photographs by Patrick Faulkner and Jack Cherry. Many of your children have already bought it. It’s a snip at €10, and can be obtained by emailing us at scc.english@yahoo.ie.

(Dates are usually for paperback publication)

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