{"id":67,"date":"2017-08-29T10:32:36","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T10:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.napier.ac.uk\/english\/?p=67"},"modified":"2017-08-29T13:04:16","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T13:04:16","slug":"reading-for-pleasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.napier.ac.uk\/english\/reading-for-pleasure\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading for Pleasure"},"content":{"rendered":"

There will be plenty on this blog about the research that the department is doing \u2013 understandably!\u00a0 But I wanted to share with you a few things that I read (mostly) for pleasure over the summer while on holiday.\u00a0 For me, it\u2019s important to read widely, and not only in the area that I research.\u00a0 Reading outside the area you\u2019re most interested in can make you rethink productively things you already (think you) know.\u00a0 Admittedly, I found reading for pleasure much harder when I was a student (both an undergrad and a research student), but remembering why you enjoy reading can also make studying easier, too.<\/p>\n

Having scanned my non-work bookshelves at the beginning of the year, I\u2019ve been reading lots of contemporary women writers in an effort to address an unconscious bias.\u00a0 Two that I particularly enjoyed were by Irish authors.<\/p>\n

Anne Enright\u2019s The Gathering<\/em><\/a>, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize<\/a>, deals with the tragically early loss of a sibling.\u00a0 The narrator, Veronica, endeavours to make sense of Liam\u2019s suicide by engaging with the complex, troubled and troubling history of her family.\u00a0 Enright movingly depicts the peculiar closenesses and distances that characterise family life, those feelings as true in the same room as when living hundreds or thousands of miles apart.\u00a0 I particularly enjoyed \u2013 if that\u2019s the right word for this moving, tragic novel \u2013 the gradual unfolding of the family\u2019s secrets, and the subtle but accessible style.<\/p>\n

Lisa McInerney\u2019s The Glorious Heresies<\/em><\/a>, which won both the Baileys Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction<\/a> and the Desmond Elliott Prize<\/a> in 2016, is an altogether different kettle of fish.\u00a0 Ryan Cusack is endeavouring to deal with the impact of his mother\u2019s death, and his alcoholic father\u2019s role as a low-level gangland pawn.\u00a0 None of this is made any easier by an over-attentive older neighbour, a prostitute searching for her disappeared boyfriend, and his own sometime career as a drug dealer.\u00a0 And none of that is helping his treasured relationship with his girlfriend Karine.\u00a0 McInerney\u2019s prose is earthily authentic, pulling no punches, and the brisk pace of the novel makes it a good read.<\/p>\n

Finally, on a more work-y note, I really enjoyed Richard Burton\u2019s long biography of the late modernist poet Basil Bunting<\/a> \u2013 all 608 engaging pages of it.\u00a0 Bunting led a remarkable life: a conscientious objector as he turned 18 at the end of the First World War, dissolute in Paris in the mid-1920s, a longstanding friend of Ezra Pound, a senior military diplomat in the middle east in the Second World War, and finally (re)discovered as a poet in the 1960s (and his sixties) thanks to the publication of his masterpiece Briggflatts<\/em> (1965) and the patronage of the poets of the British Poetry Revival.<\/p>\n

These were just the highlights.\u00a0 I hope you\u2019ve managed to make some time to read for pleasure yourselves, too.<\/p>\n

Andrew Frayn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There will be plenty on this blog about the research that the department is doing \u2013 understandably!\u00a0 But I wanted to share with you a few things that I read (mostly) for pleasure over the summer while on holiday.\u00a0 For me, it\u2019s important to read widely, and not only in the area that I research.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":68,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,16,15,17],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-andrew-frayn","tag-biography","tag-contemporary-fiction","tag-irish-literature","post-preview"],"yoast_head":"\nReading for Pleasure - English at Edinburgh Napier University<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.napier.ac.uk\/english\/reading-for-pleasure\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reading for Pleasure - 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