OPINION: Book culture alive and thriving in Mayo

I’VE been an avid reader all my life. As children, growing up in Dublin in the 1950s, we bought comics in the local shops and borrowed books from the local Carnegie library. This was an era before Telefís Éireann began operating an Irish TV channel from December 1961. In the 1950s, those Dublin families lucky enough to have a TV set depended on a grainy, black-and-white signal from the Welsh BBC system across the Irish sea. The rest of the country, parts of which still lacked even mains electricity, read books.
During secondary school from 1959 to 1964, reading habits were not exactly encouraged by the English curriculum. This consisted of a prescribed Shakespeare play (‘As You Like It’ for the Inter and ‘Hamlet’ for the Leaving); poetry that stopped at the end of the 19th century (Wordsworth, Shelley, etc), and Essays (Addison, Macaulay, Lamb). Not a novel in sight!
I have a memory of addressing the question ‘Was Hamlet mad?’ in the Leaving Cert, and pontificating about literary insanity from a position of total ignorance. The irony was that a more modern literature that should have been engaging came from Irish poetry (Ó Direáin, Pearse) and stories (Seosamh Mac Grianna, Máirtin O Cadhain). We had a wonderful Irish teacher, but even he could not overcome our lack of enthusiasm for a literature that seemed to embody the narrow and coercive state from which we were struggling to escape.
Transition to University from the Christian Brothers in 1964 opened up a wider world of reading, neglected, if not actively discouraged, at secondary school. The antics of Irish censorship in this period were even worse than the antics of anti-liberal, Trump-supporting states in the USA today. I still come across books in my library, bought in England when doing summer work as a student, which were banned in Ireland. Nothing too dreadful, I hasten to reassure: ‘Of Mice and Men’ (John Steinbeck); ‘The Country Girls’ (Edna O’ Brien); ‘Catcher in the Rye’ (JD Salinger). A glance at the current school curriculum shows just how far we have travelled since the 1960s.

In the club
I NEVER gave much thought to joining book clubs until about ten years ago. I guess that when age creeps up on you, you become more contemplative as you move away from a work-related environment into a more diverse world of people from very different backgrounds and views. What other people think about a book becomes as important as what you think about it yourself.
Anyone who watched the recent RTÉ programmes on book clubs will have noticed that they were all single-sex groups. What appealed to me in the two book clubs that allowed me join – one in Dublin, the other in Mayo – was that they were mixed. This sometimes had amusing consequences. When discussing Kate O Brien’s ‘The Land of Spices’ (banned from 1941-49), the insights provided by members on what a convent school education was like proved entertaining. As for the ‘boys’, when discussing Flann O’Brien’s ‘The Third Policeman’, initially looked on unfavourably, a discussion of the extraordinary footnotes about the hilarious scientific views of de Selby – basically, O’Brien sending up the émigré theoretical physicists operating out of Eamon de Valera’s Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies – helped enliven the debate.
The best book clubs encourage the most robust discussions and debates. One often starts the discussion with negative views on the selected book, but after debating it and hearing other viewpoints, that initial verdict can be overturned.
Conflicting attitudes often arise in selecting a book. The best approach appears to be a rotating system where all members get a turn, since it permits choices by quieter members which have very personal connections to them.
Another issue is the choice between a book that is attracting publicity (perhaps a recent Booker Prize winner) and something from a back catalogue. It is surprising how often the flavour-of-the-month choice disappoints and a rediscovered book revived from the past delights.
A perennial problem is book length. People tend to shy away from 500-page blockbusters. But one discussion of George Elliot’s ‘The Mill on the Floss’, which weighs in at 530 pages, proved so engaging that it encouraged the group to explore other books by Elliot. A recent selection of mine, ‘So Late in the Day’, by Claire Keegan (64 pages), generated an wide-ranging discussion that belied its short length. If a book is worth reading, length should not matter.

History anoraks
A VERY recent addition has been ‘The History Book Club’, run for serious history anoraks by Neil Paul out of Tertulia. So much of what goes on in the world can only be understood if the underlying historical background is made clear by somebody with knowledge and credible authority. A recent choice, ‘The Balkans – 1804-2012’, by Misha Glenny (800 pages!), was a struggle, but what goes on in that region is no longer a mystery to me.
The fact that libraries and bookshops in Mayo thrive in an era of pervasive social media and that books are discussed vigorously in clubs throughout the country, is something that cheers me up at a time when so much poisonous fake news assails us. Their survival and social role should be cherished.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.