Month: December 2024

Back to the Local

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

It was clever of Faber & Faber to re-publish Maurice Gorham’s delightful book on London’s pubs. Back to the Local was first published in 1949 (with its illustrations by Edward Ardizzone) and even then had a whiff of nostalgia about it. Gorham mourned the destruction of some of his favorite pubs in World War Two and complained about the changing habits that had led to the modernization and gentrification of others, all the while celebrating what he loved and wanted to see preserved. It’s fun to wonder what he would make of things seventy-five years on.

Londoners love their pubs and tend to be sentimental about them. Every generation discovers them and bemoans the changes they see. For myself, I celebrate the survival of the true neighborhood local. Even today there are more of them than one might think. Of course, like everyone, I deplore the trends that some others might cherish – the sports bars, the themed pubs, the fake “historical” pubs, and so on. Gorham’s little book is a fun reminder that preferences and prejudices are what being a London pub lover is all about. If one pub is not to your liking, move on to one of the other 3,500 that London has to offer.

Reading in 2024

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

Looking backwards is one of the pleasures of maintaining this blog. It has become a habit of mine at the end of each year to take a look at my reading choices in the previous twelve months. What have my reading habits been? Have any new trends or influences crept in or are the old preferences still firmly in place? Do the choices I made in the past year reveal commendable experimentation or deplorable predictability?

It’s clear, especially as far as fiction is concerned, that I tend to go back to favorite authors and that I’m quick to pick up the new books they publish. Tessa Hadley, Niall Williams, and John Banville were examples of that in 2024. I’m not searching out new novelists (new to me, that is) as often as I think I should. I read for the first time this year only Jose Saramago, Paul Lynch, and Samantha Harvey. I was glad I did in every case. I’m not showing much interest in classic fiction or indeed anything written before the 21st or 20th centuries. Turgenev’s First Love was the exception in 2024, and what a delight that was! I am reading too much second-rate mystery fiction. That needs to change. Two novels stand out from the herd: Time of the Child by Niall Williams and The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey. Both were outstanding and I have recommended them far and wide.

My non-fiction reading was more varied, but my interests are visible clearly nonetheless. Literary memoirs (Werner Herzog, Iain Sinclair, and John McPhee), travel writing inspired by spiritual quests, architecture, and some politics. I think I chose well in 2024, and there were few, if any, regrets. All the non-fiction I read this year was uniformly excellent and engaging.

I am already thinking of 2025. Every time I go into a bookshop, I leave with a different resolution. Read more classics. Read some of the great American novels. Read books from different cultures. Will I follow through on any of these high-minded ambitions? I guess I’ll see soon enough.

The Drowned

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

The arrival of a new installment in John Banville’s highly successful Quirke/Strafford series gladdens my heart. The latest, The Drowned, which I think is the tenth, continues and extends a very popular franchise. Continuity matters to devotees of such series. Familiar characters (Quirke, the pathologist, and Strafford, the Inspector), a familiar setting (Dublin in the 1950s), and most of all a familiar atmosphere or ambiance, a world of looming menace, the immanence of illness and death, and the strategies we all deploy to make sense of it all while searching for happiness.

It is clear Banville understands very well how the success of such series depends on a balance of the familiar with the new. The Drowned sees one established character depart while the stage is set for the entrance of new ones. Established relationships shift into a different gear, all against the background of a fairly straightforward plot.

Banville is a wonderfully sensitive and skilled storyteller. The Drowned, like its predecessors in the series, is the sort of novel one wants to devour in a single sitting, perhaps sitting by the fire on a winter’s day, or on a long, comfortable train journey.