Being too busy to review each and every book I read while in the land of Joyce, here’s a simple list of books I read while in lovely Eire:

The Black Count
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
Manhunt: The ten-year search for Bin Laden
The Quickening Maze
The Little Stranger – 5/5 for mounting horror
The Long Song
The Garden of Evening Mists
The Glass Room
The Lighthouse
Swimming Home
The Children’s Book
The Finkler Question
Room
Summertime
The Sisters Brothers
In a Strange Room
Jamrach’s Menagerie – one of the best from this trip
Narcopolis
Parrot and Olivier in America
Snowdrops – good tale of exploitation in post-collapse Russia
Half-Blood Blues: A Novel – Mischlings in the Third Reich
South: the story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 expedition
American Psycho
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
A Hat Full of Sky
Equal Rites
Pyramids
Witches Abroad
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Zodiac
The Best of British SF 2
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Family Matters
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
Spawn of the Comet
Ships in the Night
Toy Shop and Two Others
The Pit and the Pendulum
Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 11
Year of the Jackpot

That is all.

Peter Carey writes a book that will make your internal syntactical parser break out in hives. Ned Kelly’s tale is told from the orthogonal perspective and it is a bittersweet tale, one that is filled with rancour and gentle longing at the same time. Ned Kelly needs little introduction, being an Australian icon (posthumously, of course, few men are afforded that luxury while alive). Kelly is a real bush gentleman, a larrikin of the worst order, but one who would rather fight to the death than suffer another insult. Kelly’s gradual progress into the man he becomes is documented brilliantly. There are no lapsi calami here, but only the honest thoughts of a man who never had the luxury of a formal education of any sort, yet finds an entire continent on his trail.

A man is but the sum of all the experiences that forge him and his character responds like a molten sword on the anvil of a smithy. Should the hammer strike fair and hard, the man may emerge straight and strong, but if the hammer hits glancing blows or deals unfairly, the sword may emerge scathed and bent. Kelly’s character was shaped by the extreme injustices of his youth, the rampant racism in the establishment against the Irish, the perennial poverty that crippled his family and his mother’s choice of lovers. Leaving home as a teen, he quickly acquired a fearsome reputation as a brigand and slayer. Kelly’s end is documented in detail, with all the minutiae laid out and examined painstakingly. A man clothed in steel who would not succumb easily, and went out in a blaze of bullets against the foes he despised. There are a myriad ways in which Ned Kelly could have left this worldly plane, but perhaps this one was the most fitting of all.

ISBN: 0-679-31079-7