(no subject)

Well, I finished A Star Called Henry, and the ending was just like I predicted it would be. Oh well. As much as I didn't enjoy watching exuberant, idealistic Henry turning into a tired and jaded old man at the age of twenty, it was still a great book. I found it to be a really fascinating glimpse into a period of Irish history that I thought I knew about... In fact, I found it so fascinating that I decided to read another Irish novel (you might call it The Irish Novel) that deals with a lot of the same themes that Roddy Doyle addresses; the history of Ireland, what it means to be Irish, the different relationships with Catholicism that Irish people have, the city of Dublin, what English rule has done to the country, etc... It's a book that I had to read for class and really enjoyed, but wound up having to make do with only reading the bits and chunks of it that had time for during the semester. I have been meaning to get back to it ever since and really read it right, but somehow always felt that it would be faintly ridiculous to just pick it up off the shelf. The timing never seemed quite right, and I was always telling myself that I would have felt unbearably pretentious reading it on the subway. So I never got to it. But this time I forced myself to just go with the impulse and not chicken out. So I'm reading it. I don't really have to tell you what it is after all that, do I?