An Irishman's Book Blog

My next book review is the amazing and artful The Inexplicable Logic of my Life by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. A fantastic book that will lighten your day.   Benjamin Alire Sáenz also brought us Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe which I will be blogged about later.   Plot Summary: Seventeen-year-old Sal (Salvatore) lives in El Paso, Texas, with his adoptive father, a gay Mexican-American art professor named Vicente Silva. Vicente assumed responsibility for Sal after his mother died, when Sal was just three years old. (The connections between Sal’s mother and Vicente don’t become clear until late in the book, when Sal finally opens a letter his dying mother wrote and left in Vicente’s care.) Although Sal is white, the adoption secures his place in the heart of a loving Mexican-American family, which is headed by the matriarch Sal comes to know as Mima.  As his adoptive grandmother, Mima refers to Sal as her “hijito de mi vida,” and the ...

I love talking to people about my favourite books (don't we all) but when I mention that my favourite author is Stephen King I quite often get a reply like ... "oh, I don't like horror books".  Stephen King has written a lot of books that aren't necessarily horror, in fact in a lot of cases he starts his story with a "what if" scenario and sees where it goes. Rather than specifically writing a horror story he delves into the deepest recesses of the human condition. So, for example, after a real-life incident when his child gets nearly runover on the road by a huge truck he expands on that idea and explores what length a parent would go to save or bring back their child and we got Pet Semetary.        The brutal murder of a gay character in IT (book published 15th September 1986) was based on a real live event in Bangor, Maine (King's hometown) when a 23-year-old asthmatic gay man - Charlie Howard - was beaten by three teenage boys in the summer of 19...

A story of two twins, Jude & Noah both of whom narrate their intertwined story of love, life and bad decisions in a realistic heart-breaking way.    Source: Bustle.com   Check out the official website of Jandy Nelson  here.   Rather than get straight into the story, just a quick comment about the artistic page scrawlings. Throughout the book some of the important lines are scrawled across the pages (at least in my version; the one with the yellow cover). I really like these, what I call … moments. Like a painting or photo with a shaft of bright light or surprising bright colour, to me, they are an attempt to enhance the story of the twins who are also artists. Another interesting tool the author uses is how Noah files away ideas for future paintings; the author perfectly captures how the mind of some artist’s work. I particularly like this and it reinforces the idea that artists and writers should always carry a notebook with them to jot down ideas and ...

 Hi all, I've not been blogging for ages but have been eating books during the great lockdown of 2020. Over the next while I'll be posting up some new blogs and reblogging my favourite books previously reviewed. Hang on tight, here we go! John