Reviews and Comments

Spotted in the feed of @rra@bookwyrm.social and looked this book up. It looks good (and they said it was!) so I decided to add it to my list.

Are Ye Going Up Town is a research project by three university staff in Limerick, Ireland, who looked at the history of shopping in that city. The topic sounds a little specific, but the result presents some things I had never considered about the role shopping plays in social and urban connections. The emergence of department stores in the 19th century, and shopping centres (or 'malls') in the 20th, is something I had never considered as part of a social evolution, although this is not my field.

The book is the result of an incredibly deep project that took years to compile. It includes essays, scans of dozens of advertisements, photographs from the past two centuries, oral histories, and very concrete research. It's impressive in its depth, but it is very specific to place and field of research so may not be worth exploring unless the topics seem of interest.

This anthology of writers and others who have autism in Ireland features writers from many different fields and backgrounds, and with many different variations of autism and AuDHD. Each chapter gives a personal view from the writer.

With so many voices, there is space given to many different perspectives on living with autism. For someone with limited knowledge, it gave me a clearer view of the smorgasbord of personalities of autistic-diagnosed people in Ireland. The unique experiences and diverse writing styles bring a clear individuality to every story. The editing and design is really tidy and considerate, and the perspectives are clearly presented. As with any book of this kind, there is natural repetition in chapters where people with similar diagnoses write about their often similar experiences, but this takes little from the book.

I picked Echenoz' book out at random, judging it by its cover, and the adage rang true here. This biographical novel of the composer Ravel begins with some pretty clumsy patriarchal moments, and just goes downhill from there. I found it slow and dull, and skipped the last 20 pages. Even for a short book it wasn't worth it.

Amartya Sen's 1999 book presents his dominant economic ideals, mostly focussed on how economic development must be coupled with social schemes and not just an influx of money. The idea seems a little obvious to anyone who reads feminist philosophy, but the evidence presented is written for people in economics who may not always encounter these ideas. It's hard to tell how radical this may have seemed in 1999, because I am not familiar enough with the school of economics.

It is presented as a layperson's book, and for the first third Sen does a good job in grounding how economic theory reached this point. Later on the chapters remain interesting but become a little dry for someone like me who is not an economist. The ideas remain sound, and the comparisons between countries and their social and economic positions, but the writing got a little too domain-specific for me.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a gentle voice in mindfulness. This short book gives reflections and meditations, and a few nice illustrations, on the topic of food and eating. They ask us to be mindful of the complexity of our food chain and the human and nonhuman actors that make it possible for us to eat in this modern world. Like all Hanh's writing, it's a beautiful, gentle book.

My partner bought this and a couple others from this series because they enjoyed the organisation's online articles.

I love Tokarczuk so much and this one is the supposed masterpiece. It has been on my list for years and it's about time I gave it the time.

Recommended by a colleague while I have been working on a project in Limerick. I got a copy from the library.

I picked this up in the library, my eye caught by the cover, and took it out without knowing what it was about (it's a historical fiction of the last days of the composer Ravel)

Recommended at a talk at a conference in Austria in 2024, added here to my (endless) 'to read' pile

A friend visited recently and was reading this. She said I would love it, and I expect that I will, so I'm adding it to my wishlist.

I love Han Kang's writing and was delighted when they won the Nobel Prize. A couple of months ago a colleague gave me a book token for a favour I did them, and I picked this one up with it in a local book shop. Just started reading today.