Bought in Dublin, Collins is a writer I’ve read in the past and often had a hard time finding his books in the US (I’ve occasionally ordered them from Amazon UK) so I was on the lookout for him.

These stories are such a unique combination of funny and harsh: you’re sometimes embarrassed to be laughing at the funny parts, particularly as they’re so quickly followed by the serious and dark.

Catholics dealing with the prophesised end of the world; the portioning out throughout the day as an alcoholic drinks himself to death… I think my favorite may have been “The Horses” where a man is a wildly accurate race picker to no benefit to himself.

Bought by Silvia on our trip to Dublin.

Entertaining enough; I enjoyed the brusque “what the author thinks is Americanness” of Saxon’s character. But it was a bit convoluted and one of those mysteries with too many twists, to the point where it becomes not very believable.

Another Dublin purchase/Irish author. My dad introduced me to Boland a few years ago.

As intense and personal as the work of Sharon Olds, these also have highly literary sensibilities and allusions, along the lines of Anne Carson (but perhaps more approachable for the lay person).

Not just because books of poetry tend to be slim, but also because poems reach further into you with each reading, I tend to not put a book of poetry on the list as “finished” until I’ve read it five or six times over a few days. These are poems I could read for months and not be done with.

From “Indoors”:
Find me a word for love. Make it damp. Sinuous companion,
knowing how to enter, settle in wood, salt the sheets
with cold, saying by this that we could never be
anything but an island people.

From “Letters to the Dead”:
How many daughters stood alone at a grave,
and thought this of their mothers’ lives?
That they were young in a country that hated a woman’s body.
That they grew old in a country that hated a woman’s body.

The first book of this forensic mystery series, of which I’ve already read the second. Since the second book is very contiguous, I already knew the outcome of this book. But it was well-written enough that it still felt suspenseful to me. The dialogue in the scenes between Jess and Brockton was really enjoyable.

Jess’s mixture of scholarly erudition and quirky irreverence always caught me by surprise, like topspin on a serve in tennis or Ping-Pong.

Very excited to find this for sale in Dublin in February (won’t be released in U.S. until July 28), this is the followup to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, one of my favorite books from last year.

I really liked it. But there’s a bit of a sadistic streak in these books that may not be palatable for everyone and there’s a bit more of it in this book as Lisbeth’s former life takes a much bigger role this time around.

Highly recommend both of these. They are really smart, really tightly plotted and interesting from many different angles.

Random quote I enjoyed (As Lisbeth reads some private police reports via computer hacking): It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee.