Category Archives: Books

Steve Cummins: Where do Daddies come from? A pregnancy bible for men

  By Amanda | December 17, 2011 - 9:58 am | Books, Comedy
Comments Off

I went to the recording of Republic of Telly last Sunday (and before you ask yes Dermot is kinda cute up close!) and the extremely talented Steve Cummins was the warm up, get the audience in a laughing mood guy. So being the nice person I am I sent him a message the next day telling him I really enjoyed his stuff. I was not prepared for his response, which went along the lines of on the off-chance that you are pregnant I have a new book out… or if you want to get pregnant that would be great. Hmmm. I’m not really feeling in the mood to get pregnant at the moment so we made a compromise which involves me telling all you lovely people about his new book. We all know there a about a gazillion books out there to help women through pregnancy from what to expect … There’s more →

Book Review: The 80s Kid

  By Sinead Keogh | November 18, 2011 - 9:51 am | Books, Nostalgia Week, Random Whimsy, Vintage
Comments Off

A copy of The 80s Kid was deposited into our greedy little hands this time last week. It had been talked up somethin’ fierce by the guy who suggested we review it and was cleverly delivered when Team Culch were onto their third Friday night drink and would’ve been endeared by a triangle-cut sandwich. On a quick page-flick we were impressed with the poppingly-colourful design and the neat little handbag size of it … but would it pass muster when we sat down for a proper read? Only Saturday morning’s hangover and a dimly-lit room in Culch Towers would tell… But wait, says you, just what is The 80s Kid? In a sentence, it’s a hardback full-colour 160-page nostalgiafest featuring everything it meant to grow up in Ireland in the 80s and 90s. Written by Andrew Murray, himself an 80s kids, it features the hairdos, hairdon’ts, bad telly, good telly, … There’s more →

Literary Belfast launches on Tuesday

  By Ronan | September 2, 2011 - 12:00 pm | Books
Comments Off

The biggest ever gathering of Belfast’s writers is to be held to mark the official launch of a series of new initiatives to highlight the city’s rich literary heritage and vibrant contemporary scene. On Tuesday, September 6, Belfast City Council and its various partners will officially launch ‘Literary Belfast’, with a gala evening at the Ulster Hall, featuring 14 writers reading from their works. These writers include Colin Bateman, Ciaran Carson, Patricia Craig, Leontia Flynn, Marie Jones, Michael Longley, Martin Lynch, Bernard MacLaverty, Owen McCafferty, Sinead Morrissey, Paul Muldoon, Frank Ormsby, David Park and Glenn Patterson. “The United Kingdom currently features as number one in a list, compiled by TripAdvisor, of the top ten literary destinations in the world, and literary tourism contributes up to £2.6 billion a year to the British economy,” explained Alderman Christopher Stalford, Chairman of BCC’s Development Committee. “To help us capitalise upon this massive market, … There’s more →

Sweary’s Jaw: A Novel Interpretation

  By Lisa McInerney | August 22, 2011 - 9:00 am | Books, Celebs, Featured Post, Gossip, Sweary's Jaw, The Culch
2 Comments

If you confessed to not knowing who the Kardashians were, far from sneering at your blissful ignorance, I think I’d have to kiss you. There are so few innocents left in the world. A kiss would be the least I could do. Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian are a veritable Cerberus of inanity and lip gloss, three vessels equally vapid and privileged and about as relevant to the real world as the threat of Godzilla. Everything about them is for sale – their weddings, their fallings-out, their bloating concerns, their likes and dislikes. Stars of a number of shiny, stupid shows, they truly epitomise reality TV, for though their carry-on is as planned and scripted as an episode of Sex and The City, actresses they are not. Their reality is TV. Their reality is celebrity. They exist privately to exist publicly, which is as sad for the onlooker as it … There’s more →

Quick Review: Recent Reads #2

  By travors | August 10, 2011 - 10:57 am | Books
Comments Off

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling. Yes I’m little bit behind the rest of planet earth in that I’ve only just finished this, the fourth in the Harry Potter series. But just in case there’s anyone out there who hasn’t gotten to it yet, I’ll try to avoid spoilers. Here we get a sense of the 3 main characters growing up and suffering from the same teen related goofiness we did at their age. And later, we get a taste of that darker writing style which stays for the rest of the series. Easily my favourite Harry Potter so far, this book shocked me just as much as it did everyone else. Brilliant, awe inspiring genius from J.K. Rowling. Scores: 4 out of 5.   Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons. I read Carrion Comfort when I was a teenager and always remembered it as one of … There’s more →

Quick Review: Recent Reads #1

  By travors | August 3, 2011 - 11:49 am | Books
Comments Off

Ender’s Game by Orson Scot Card. I’d seen Ender’s Game pop up at the head of many Top 100/50/10 Sci-Fi book lists, so decided to give it a go. There is a clever (and brutal) plot here, and I can see elements of this story have been appropriated for many films. Some interesting reflections on war too, both good and bad. A lot of the action takes place in Zero G, the description of those scenes was sometimes hard to follow. Ultimately, I found I didn’t care about the protagonist and the last few chapters, with their weird religious undertone, felt bizarre and tacked on. Scores: 2 out of 5. The Liar by Stephen Fry. I’m a huge fan of Stephen Fry and had high hopes for The Liar. It started off well and I found myself laughing out loud many times. As I progressed though, I began to feel … There’s more →

The Loft Bookshop

  By Colm O'Brien | July 8, 2011 - 4:26 pm | Books, Events, The Culch
Comments Off

For any bookish types who happen to be in town this evening, The Loft Bookshop on the top floor of Middle Abbey Street’s Twisted Pepper building is having a grand opening starting from 7.30pm, featuring “some wine, a little food and some music”. It’s a lovely wee place altogether — the selection is small but thoughtully assembled (any shop that stocks The Illuminatus! Trilogy is aces in my book) and the staff are friendly and genuinely enthusiastic. Plus the award-winning 3fe coffee shop is just downstairs (although it closes at 7pm… still, future reference and all that). Give it a look, why don’t you. http://theloftbookshop.com/ http://twitter.com/theloftbookshop

Literary Death Match @ The Workman’s Club this Friday 24th June

  By Éilish Burke | June 22, 2011 - 2:53 am | Books, Comedy, Events, Performance Art, The Arts, The Culch
Comments Off

Feeling a little devoid of intellect? Been watching too many episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians lately? Well here’s a night out to redress the balance and allow you to come across all intelligent and shit. Literary Death Match is a global series of author-readings which happens everywhere from Brooklyn to Berlin and involves local writing talent battling it out on-stage to win over audience and judging panel alike. But don’t worry, it’s not po-faced and exclusive. It’s more like X-Factor for bookworms - except thankfully without the distraction of Simon Cowell’s too-unbuttoned shirt and Chezzel’s ill-advised “outrageous” outfits. LDM comes to Dublin for the fourth time this Friday 24th June in the charmingly shabby-chic surroundings of The Workman’s Club. A fine line up of Irish writing talent will belt out their stuff, competing to take the Death Match crown. They are: poet Niamh MacAlister, BAFTA-nominated writer and director … There’s more →

Book Review: In Office Hours by Lucy Kellaway

  By Jenny Foxe | May 17, 2011 - 11:47 am | Books, The Culch
Comments Off

I picked up this book with glee. ‘A funny and moving tale of two affairs…don’t miss’ shouts the cover. What a great excuse to have to read some steamy chic-fic which the Sunday Times declares is ‘Whip-smart and blisteringly observant. Funny, truthful and cracking satire’ And so it begins - at the end; two out of the blue emails to two women from two men who have obviously caused them much heartache and emotional chaos. So far so good. Then it takes us back two years to when Stella is a bigshot economist in Atlantic Energy, a global oil firm, firmly keeping her married home life out of the office because a photo of her child on her desk may reveal a vulnerability which would be used against her in the cut throat oil world. A female colleague is leaving after making a fool out of herself and ‘destroying her … There’s more →

Competition Closed: Soundings

  By Sinead Keogh | October 18, 2010 - 4:57 pm | Books, Competitions, Featured Post, wantsies
13 Comments

**Competition closed, congratulations to Emer.** If you were in secondary school in the ’80s or ’90s then you probably had a copy of Soundings. It was the go-to poetry anthology for Leaving Cert for over two decades and I’m told it holds many happy memories for many a grown up.(I don’t mean to kick you in the stomach or anything, but I’m too young to know, Leaving Cert ’04 REPRESENT! :p). Luckily, it’s got more than its nostalgia factor going for it. When the good folk at Gill & MacMillan sent us a review copy there was plenty to be delighted by on browsing through the poems as a Soundings first-timer. From Monaghan’s own Patrick Kavanagh (“the bicycles go by in twos and threes, there’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight” - Patrick Kavanagh. “Nobody on them, just these feckin’ bicycles!” - Tommy Tiernan) to Eliot, Yeats, Thomas Kinsella … There’s more →

Competition Closed: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, Midnight Poe and The Happy Prince at Dalkey Book Festival

  By Sinead Keogh | June 9, 2010 - 11:13 am | Books, Celebs, Competitions, Events, Kids, The Arts, Theatre, Tourism
11 Comments

**Competition Closed - Winners will be contacted** Summertime and the living is easy…local towns and villages are coming up trumps with the usual round of summer festivals and this year there’s a brand spanking new one to add to the calendar. Hold onto your hats, I’m about to sing the praises of one of them like the inky-fingered book geek that I am. The first Dalkey Book Festival kicks off on Friday June 18th and runs until Sunday 20th and their programme of events is worth getting excited about. If you’re the bookworm kind, it has all of the expected elements of a book fest with talks from Marita Conlon-McKenna (she of Under the Hawthorne Tree) on writing for children, John Connolly and Declan Hughes on 10 Crime Novels to Read Before You Die, Conor McPherson on Writing for the Stage and of course Dalkey’s most famous writer in residence … There’s more →

Broken Spine #27: The Big Opening

  By Ronan | June 6, 2010 - 8:23 pm | Books
1 Comment

It’s that time of year again folks. No, not the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny, but something far more hilarious. The winners of the 2010 Lyttle Lytton Contest have been announced. For those of you who don’t know, the Lyttle Lytton Contest was established in 2001 and celebrates the worst first line of a novel. It’s an offshoot of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Wheras the Bulwer-Lytton Contest can have entrants of any length (and usually does), the Lyttle Lytton Contest is only open to opening lines of twenty-five words or less. The 2009 winner of the longer contest was this beauty by David McKenzie: Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew … There’s more →

Broken Spine #26 - Travel Guides

  By Ronan | May 19, 2010 - 2:21 pm | Books
2 Comments

It’s that time of year again. The birds are singing, the sunbeds are filling up, the clouds are starting to clear, the ash is clogging up… wait, strike that last part. It’s summer, and the time for everyone’s annual trip away from it all. So whether you’re going to the Ring of Kerry or to the Pacific Ring of Fire, there seems to be a travel guide for everywhere. For the past few days, I’ve been getting feedback from people on twitter about the best and worst travel guides they’ve used, but there has been no consensus. But I did get some nice tips.

Broken Spine #25: One Book, One Twitter

  By Ronan | May 6, 2010 - 12:17 pm | Books
13 Comments

Many of you may have read Dracula or Dorian Grey as part of Dublin’s One City, One Book month this year or last. But now a bigger event is trundling into town…every town. One Book, One Twitter began yesterday, and is the brainchild of Crowdsourcing author Jeff Howe. The book chosen was decided by a public vote (which for once wasn’t rigged by Irish voters to be Roy Keane’s Biography or the like), and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods beat off stiff competition from Slaughterhouse Five, Farenheit 451, Song of Solomon, and The God of Small Things.