TPQ: What are you currently reading?
BR: Sir They’re Taking The Kids In. I came upon it when looking online for something to read. It’s about squaddies on the ground in the early days of the Northern conflict. It’s a decent read so far.
TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?
BR: Best - Sophia’s Story. It’s truely a horror story that happened in Ireland in the 80’s about a young girl and her family who were abused by a very angry paedophile father. Worst - The Compassionate Terrorist by Brian Godfrey. Didn’t finish it.
TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?
BR: Can’t remember the name of the book but it had a poem in it called “Lake Isle of Innisfree". I can remember reciting it at school many times.
TPQ: Favourite Childhood author?
BR: Louis L’amour. Simply because those were the books my father read so they naturally fell into my hands. Cowboy books were popular currency amongst rural communities in times past so there was always a plentiful supply
TPQ: First book to really own you?
BR: I’ve no idea what the name of the book was but I can tell you it was about children shipped off to New Zealand for whatever reason. Some were taught by the Christian Brothers but most of them were put to work and met with the most horrific abuse. I was about 15 at the time. This was my first introduction to human trafficking and slavery.
TPQ: Favourite male and female author?
BR: I really don’t have any preference for any author male or female.
A Berlin Book Tower in memory of the Nazi book burning.
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TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?
BR: Fact. Only I think as it’s mainly because of the amount of fiction I read growing up.
TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?
BR: Páidí. It’s about a Gaelic footballer from Kerry. He was a great character both on and off the field.
TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?
BR: The books I refuse to read are the autobiographies by current sports people. I always felt short changed so stopped reading them. At least wait for their careers to be over and retired so we get the full story.
TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?
BR: I don’t understand myself most times so picking a book …
TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?
BR: Dessie Farrell's Tangled up in Blue. I gave it to a friend who’s a Dub. Seemed appropriate.
TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?
BR: My Father’s Watch, The Story of a Child Prisoner in 70’s Britain. By Patrick Maguire. It’s about the terrible injustice that was visited upon Patrick at 14 along with the rest of his family - the Maguires living in London at the height of the PIRA’s bombing campaign. Their story should be told to the world simply to show how the corrupt legal system and police in England treated innocent people.
TPQ: A "must read" you intend getting to before you die?
BR: Hopefully when Michael O’Leary of Ryanair retires, he will write his autobiography.
⏩ Boyne Rover is a long standing patron of TPQ
Boyne Rover - I loved this. You and I have discussed many things and books were amongst them but I had little idea of your wider reading interests. I actually read Louis L'amour in jail in 82 - a couple of them. Pat Livingstone said to me they will fill an hour. He was one of the jail's great readers, like the late Seamy Martin: people who would always have a good book recommendation and were rarely seen in their cell without a book. A few years back I read Appaloosa and then Resolution by Robert B. Parker - Westerns. They were brilliantly written. I noticed when I went into the Crum in 1974 as a 16 year old and going to the bookcase in the middle of A Wing, it was stacked with westerns. I wasn't into reading them then. I would say the first book to own me was Shane by Jack Schaefer. My mother even took me to see the film. Booker's Dozen is by far my favourite slot of the week.
ReplyDeleteIt's great fun doing it cheers AM,
ReplyDeleteI thought that was a good point about the books by current sports people. I guess a much of it is prompted by getting a book out while they are still in the limelight but as you point out, all you get is a very limited account. And how much can we really trust an autobiography anyway?
ReplyDeleteI am not normally a reader of westerns but I do enjoy the films. I read a handful of Elmore Leonard westerns purely because I enjoy his crime novels so much. He wrote 3:10 to Yuma in 1953 and was still writing up until his death 60 years later. His books are light, full of intrigue and are plenty of fun. He was the Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America for many years.
ReplyDeleteI believe a good autobiography, which should be based on ongoing notes or a diary can be more reliable than a memoir which is a different animal and one written mostly from memory and allows more poetic license. You get bias with both but potentially more accuracy with an autobiography.
AM,the Crum was a miserable place by all accounts and a stack of books must have allowed some solace.
Simon - it wasn't so miserable in 74 when I first went into it (A Wing). It grew miserable - but reading was always a great means of getting through it. I guess that made the blanket protest so desolate in any stimulatory sense. Prison staff violence was not as much an obstacle to overcome as tedium.
DeleteAM, I remember in the early 1990s that prisoners couldn't wait to be sentenced to get away from that dump the Crum up to the more amenable Long Kesh.
ReplyDeleteTedium can be a horror story. I have never experienced it but I can imagine it must be soul destroying. Prisoners should have access to books and education as well as exercise through prison law as a human right. Otherwise it is inhuman and degrading treatment. Mental fatigue and tedium can only be psychological manipulation to break the spirit. What else could it be?
Simon by the autumn of 74 it had become a very dank place and much more difficult to navigate your way through in terms of an easy passage. The Kesh always offered more freedom (the cages) and certainly from the early 80s on the Blocks did likewise.
DeleteThe Blanket protestors were denied any reading material other than the Bible. A BOV member said to me in 78 after she had inquired if we had any requests - and I sarcastically said books - that I had the only book I needed the Good Book. I told her I would use it as toilet roll before I would ever read it. I have never looked at a page of it since. To think that Bobby and the 9 boys who never survived to see the fruits of their labour endured that regime for years before they forced it to yield. The worst sorts to listen to were the biblical screws: bores. The best screws to have about the place were generally the English ones as they didn't care much. The hadn't the NI unionist's animosity. At times it was like the DUP running the wing.
I remember doing a six month stretch in the blocks (for having a car that was not my own!) before the blanket protest and there was a screw (ex-cop) who used to bring in books from his house and let me read them if they were not on the wing. Freddie Chambers, long since dead.
After the blanket protest there was this massive surge in reading - everything we could get our hands on. It started out with the screws putting a few shelves of books in the big cell. Then once we started taking them to our cells they began letting novels in.
I understand the loss of the hunger strikers gained so much, was a sea-change both inside and outside the prisons but I would be averse to any such strike as the loss of so many good people is a gnawing gap in society and there may be other ways to gain demands. However, saying that if you're getting beaten and criminalised etc and see no other way out through your desperation and lack of options I can understand it.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear there were decent screws. People are people after all.
As for the open door policy of the 1990s (when many internal doors were not locked with access to the yard etc) it undoubtedly added to the thirst for peace.
It's not a strict analogy but treating criminal prisoners with dignity would likewise yield dividends.
Great addition to Bookers Dozen.
ReplyDelete'Worst book' is a very difficult thing to quantify. There have been books that I have stopped reading because they are either boring, impenetrable or it just wasn't working for me. Some have been passable throughout, only to completely blow it at the end. Would any of these qualify as "worst" (which suggests amateurishness, offensiveness and outlandishness)?
Christopher - we have played around with the format since you did it in a bid to see if we could improve it and elicit more detail without extending the questions beyind 13.
DeleteI think that particular probe one framed in a respondent's pet hate of books read or books attempted but unable to complete because they wee so woeful. I think I have 3 in that category. Worst like best is worst for you: it might be regarded by many others as a great read.