Sunday Best!

My policy on reading is pretty broad - I'll read anything that sustains my interest, which itself is pretty broad. Though much of what I currently read relates in some way or other to crime fiction, I'm happy to give any genre a go and it happens that the best book I've read in years was a 'literary' one that I bought on a total whim one Sunday while in Reid's of Nassau Street. The book is by the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas and I bought it solely because of its title ... Dublinesque. Doing that is a precarious business, I know, but sometimes it works and this time I was bang on the mark. Dublinesque  is a heady, challenging but insightful read and is broadly about a Spanish independent publisher who has spent his life in pursuit of a Real McCoy successor to Joyce and Beckett but because he/she has eluded him, he eventually gives up in despair and becomes convinced that the literary novel is actually dead. As such, he decides he will conduct a requiem in its memory and where better to have it but in Jim and Sam's home town - wherein the story unsuspectingly comes to life. But it's the sort of life, (i.e brilliantly infuriating), that only Dublin can really do and this, in particular, is what makes Dublinesque so compelling.

Dublinesque ... well brainy!