It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts. I’ve read a lot recently and haven’t stockpiled much so have only had whichever book I’m devouring beside my bed. However I was gifted some books recently and am looking forward to spending cold mornings in bed reading the below with a never ending supply of coffee. Hey, there have to be some upsides to unemployment right?! So herewith the view from my pillow last night:
Starting from the bottom:
When I visited Cork at the weekend the lovely Sarah from The Licentiate gave me a copy of Chanel: An Intimate Life by Lisa Chaney. I started it on the train journey home and it’s well researched, interesting and beautifully written. Expect a proper review in the coming weeks.
My mate Mo gave me Half the Sky: How to Change the World by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn. We had both just done a guest post on the “Because I Am A Girl” blog for Plan Ireland (Mo’s here and mine here) and Mo had read the book around the same time. She pressed it on me saying it was a must-read. To my shame I haven’t got round to it yet but it’s in The Pile so it’s only a matter of time.
My Dad bought me this biography of famous Italian artist Caravaggio after our trip to Rome in September. It has special meaning for us as we were looking at a Caravaggio painting in a church in Rome when we got some particularly good news.
You may remember I raved about Edward St. Aubyn’s Some Hope trilogy a while back. Mother’s Milk is the continuation of this and as a result of reading his previous work my anticipation levels are high.
Lastly, David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice is a favourite seasonal read of mine and I think it’ll be on my present list this year (as in: presents to give not receive). Sedaris is a brilliant humorist and the story “The Santaland Diaries” is worth buying the collection for alone – it tells the true story of Sedaris’ employment as an elf in Macy’s in New York and I laughed out loud while reading it, very rare for me.
(In the background is the ever present bottle of Ballygowan Sparkling water – I could get into an argument on the merits of carbonated versus naturally sparkling water but I won’t because I don’t live in California – and a glass of wine. Londis are doing a bottle of good Châteauneuf-du-Pape for €13.99 – sure you couldn’t leave it behind!)
Alex Donald's Multiverse 
These essays are amazing. At times I thought that Sedaris has just had an unusually funny life filled with strange characters, that he has better material than the rest of us. But then I thought, shoot, I’ve taken language classes and spent time in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and I didn’t get even one really good story out of it. It takes talent to have seen the humor in many of these experiences, and talent to have preserved that humor on the page. Throughout the book Sedaris makes much of his drug-addled brain and mediocre intelligence, but he’s clearly a genius.