Books I Read Before The Invention Of The Internet.

Nigellicus: I read this in secondary school. It wasn't on a course or anything, it was just that I'd read Animal Farm and it was the first time I'd read something that was obviously very good but also completely hateable, so I felt compelled to try 1984 and, same.

Nigellicus: My college girlfriend gave me this, insisted I read it in fact, then the cover got torn, and she became my ex-girlfriend and I just couldn't give it back. I did read it though! Cindy, if you see this, I still have it and will return it if asked! Sorry about the tear on the cover!

Nigellicus: Fuck this book, fuck this book to hell and back, thank you Orwell and the Irish educational system for crushing my young soul.

Nigellicus: I loved this. The sheer cracked wild melodrama absolutely delighted me.

Nigellicus: Such a dark, grim book to make kids read, honestly it'd put anyine off reading. It was mesmerisingly good though, not a million miles away fom some horror novels I'd read, but I wish they'd put Wodehouse on the syllabus instead.

Nigellicus: Blew my tiny little mind.

Nigellicus: I read this when I was a teenager and yeah, it was good, but not 'reread it over and over again' good, which to be honest is what I really wanted out of a book.

Nigellicus: I was ornery enough to resent being told I had to read a book but my truculence did not survive the real fun of this book.

Nigellicus: A real minderbender, as it were, I loved the looped and wiggly way the story was told, and it is very funny, but also desperately sad and angry and crushing such as only literary books that are funny can be.

Nigellicus: We were doing Oliver Twist for our fifth year drama and I was the Artful Dodger, but before the play went on each night we'd wait around in costume in a nearby classroom, and I picked up someone's copy of Great Expectations left on a shelf and started reading and spent the week reading it every nght before going on because say what you will, Dickens is damn well readable.

Nigellicus: Yeah I absorbed this until it became part of my very being for a while.

Nigellicus: Adding Huck Finn reminded me that I had, in fact, read Tom Sawyer, although I was pretty young when I did, and I was always worried about Tom getting himself in terrible trouble. The caves at the end, though...

Nigellicus: Written as a prequel, this is the most wildly inventive and fun of all of the Narnia books. You never know where it's going to go or what's going to happen. The Wood Between the Worlds, the derted city, the statues, the queen rampaging through London, the newly born animals rushing around for the sheer joy of existing, trying to plant the evil uncle because his hair looks like tree roots, it's scary and exciting and hilarious, I read it in a holdiay caravan in Ballybunion and I nearly jumped through the windows with the sheer excitement of it.

Nigellicus: 'Constancy is a theme of Persuasion, discuss' was the perrenial exam question about Persuasion and you know what, looking back, I'm not sure constancy is actually the theme of Persuasion at all.

Nigellicus: I went on holiday with my family to Kilkee, found the library, found this there, spent the week in the library reading it. Didn't finish it before I went home, found a copy second hand weeks or even months later. Bloody brilliant masterpiece.

Nigellicus: I preferred Dubliners because it was shorter, but it certainly has its moments.

Nigellicus: All about the ghastliness of colonialism, which is that the darkness at the heart of the savages in darkest Africa infects the colonisers and corrupts them and makes them dark and savage too. Have I got that right?

Nigellicus: Read this over a Halloween, barely emerged from my room, though I did go trick or treating in the right frame of mind because of It, the sheer epic scope of it left me in awe, but that bit at the end never sat right with me I don't understand why he or his editors thought that was a good idea.

Nigellicus: You know what, I never finished this. I was stuck on the night shift in the remote back of a big factory next to a grumbling machine spitting out lengths of cable, and I got to the bit where they're plodding around Eastern Europe and I just stopped caring.

Nigellicus: I bought this for my sister one Christmas, then so many people told me that I had to read it was exactly the sort of book I'd like, I borrowed it off her, and read it - it's one of the books I read sitting in a car beside my Dad's petrol pumps, but I haven't mentioned that category yet, have I? - and you know what, they were right.

Nigellicus: I read the Discworld series in order, as they came out, so there. Well, okay, I think the third had come out by the time I started, but I went back to the first!

Nigellicus: Once upon a time, this was merely a slick sci-fi thriller about cloned dinosaurs, albeit a massively bestselling one. I used to scn the pages of Empire magazine, in the shop, of course, for news about upcoming films and who was making what. Stephen Spielberg, you say! Of course Crichton couldn't have written a more Spielberg-friendly book if he tried. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure he was trying exactly that. It was a fun book, and it was a fun film.

Nigellicus: Also blew my tiny little mind.

Nigellicus: Achingly good stories, their craft is spine-tingling.

Nigellicus: Ah I see it's on my internet catalogue. Oh well since we're here: my Mum gave me this for Christmas when I was in College. My Mum was always great about getting me books. I can't imagine what sort of state I was in, or what she must have been thinking, but she asked me what book I wanted and I said The Name Of The Rose. Then I must have vanished, away on a train, self-absorbed and miserable, no notion of what she must have been feeling. I tried to start it, gave up, then a feorciously intelligent Polish girl I had a crush on asked me if I'd read it and I said I'd tried, and she said, oh, it's very good and not a difficult read at all. So I read it. She was right.

Nigellicus: I think it's fair to say that at the time, once you read it, nothing would ever be the same again. I mean if you were somone who read comics, that is. I flipped through it obsessively in Easons in Limerick long before I dared buy a copy of my own. Of course, one of the central episodes of the book, the Kitty Genovese story, turns out to be pure cop nonsense. Poor old Rorschach needn't have lost quite so much faith in humanity, eh?

Nigellicus: College and me did not get on for reasons that never became clear until decades later and an adhd with autism diagnosis. Yay! Spent an enjoyable few weeks stuck in the library reading this though.

Nigellicus: I wrote a vaguely Christmassy article/story for the College Gazette and called it Yes, Virginia, There Is A Lighthouse, and to this day I don't know if it was too obscure or way too obvious.

Nigellicus: The lecturer who prescribed (prescribed? that's not the word, what's the word...?) this was not impressed by the way Faulkner depcited the sister getting her drawers muddy and all that, you know, ahem ahem, symbolised, and she was not generally impressed at Faulkner's ability to depict female characters at all.

Nigellicus: The framing story got boring and annoying, the Narrative itself was uttely riveting, I think I had a right to suspect that one would properly bleed into the other as the blurb hinted, but of course it never does. I want a book with just the Narrative.

Nigellicus: This was on the other side of that King omnibus I sneak-read - see my note on Carrie - and here it was. Horror wasn't scary! Horror was exciting! Horror was full of tension and suspense! And action and adventure! But ordinary peoplein ordinary towns doing the action and having the adventure and mostly, but not quite all, getting horrible murdered!) What did I know about how 'real' his depiction of small-town America and small-town American folk were? No more than I knew about how real Tolkein's depcition of Hobiton and Hobbits, that's what.) No going back after this.

Nigellicus: My tiny little mind? Yup, blown. To elaborate. I was fascinated by horror books, but felt that I was still too young for them. I'd read a Dean Koontz that I was too young to borrow in the libraryin one day, though, so i was pretty sure it was the genre for me. My sister got a really battered and dishevelled omnibus of Carrie Aand Salem's Lot from the library, because she WAS old enough, and while she was away I snuck into her room and, basically, read both of them, and a Stephen King fan was born. The bit where they pelted her with tampons? Once I got past that bit of real-world-horror I was pretty much ready for anything.

Nigellicus: Bits of this were disconcertingly like Monty Python sketches. 'e does the police in different voices, though.

Nigellicus: Sure enough, it did end, but who wants a book that never ends? You'd never read any other books! Not only that, it ended right in the middle of the book, which left a whole lot of book for things to get dark and weird.

Nigellicus: The 'tiny mind blown' schtick has gotten thin. Almost as thin as the remaining shreds of my tiny mind after this was done with it.

Nigellicus: Okay, this note gets very personal and autobiographical. There came a point when I failed the course I'd been only nominally attending, when I was utterly broken as a human being, just soaked in failure and guilt and shock and self-loathing, and yet still, somehow, reasonably cheerfuland functional. Books and comics gave me a reason to go on. I stayed in Cork, and went on the Dole (oh the shame and humiliation), which was a step up, making me independent and somewhat secure. I didn't have to keep begging off my utterly aghast parents, and they didn't have to keep supporting me. Of course I had to find a job. of course I never went looking for one. I simply couldn't understand why I wasn't looking for a job. Just go in and ask, everyone does it, wouldn't you like to work in a bookshop? SO WHY AREN'T YOU ASKING? Now I figure my adhd and autism had me clamped tight in executive dysfunction and reading was my dopamine. It was a friend who got me an interview with Dunnes Stores where I worked for the next year or two. I was good, even though I didn't really like the job, I worked hard because not working hard left you crushingly, dismally bored in horrible shop you couldn't escape. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I think on the first day I went to the welfare office, I borrowed this from the library. It really, really helped a lot. Wow, that was mildly cathartic.

Nigellicus: I was reading lots of crime, and it seemed almost obligatory to read Chandler, so i found this second hand and it was... okay? Some all-time great lines, for sure, but I didn't rush out to get the rest.

Nigellicus: It was weird, almost as soon as this book was out, I found a second hand copy. What, you think I could afford new books?

Nigellicus: I think UCC English Department might have been going through a Faulkner phase.

Nigellicus: It was coming up to Christmas when I read this, appropriately enough, but all damp and dark, not snowy, and I was in the tlat above the steep narrow Cork street. I remember thinking it was incredible. I'm... not sure I could bear a reread now, though.

Nigellicus: I had read and reread Lord Of the Rings until i had sellotaped the spine to keep it from cracking apart and the covers from falling off, but what could I do? There was nothing else like it! Oh no, wait, what's this? Something else like it! Critics, accurately enough, complain about derivative fantasy trilogies that mimic and ape Tolkein - for feck's sake the wizard guy DIES AND THEN COMES BACK the party splits and one lot goes to a big siege (gnomes?!?! Yellow-skinned gnomes?!?!) while the rest sneak into the Dark land! There was a weird techno-monster, though, that suggested some sort of post-apocalyptic situation, never returned to in any of the books. read wow I can remember a LOT about this book - but lots of kids, like me, grew up reading, as you can see elsewhere on this list, series of books that were basically the same formula over and over again, with little in the way of variation, and once you got hooked on one, you just wanted to keepreading more of it. Hence: Shannara. It's terrible, of course, but I have to say, the bathos of the solution to the central mystery - What Does The Sword Do? - is still pretty good. I went o to read Elfsones, where I leanred the word 'denizens and where the Elfstones were 'brought forth' every few pags, but, crucially, didn't work, and the bit where men, elves and trolls are all fighting side by side, enmity set aside, was nice. I got one other one - Wishsong? But never felt compelled to go further with my Shannaraing.

Nigellicus: I really liked this because the teen protagonist was clearly not enjoying being kept ignorant and pulled around from one place to another, subjected to appalling ordeals and endless hints about how special he is and his great destinies and grouching and rebelling about it. As a teenager, I related. Later on, of course, though I can't remember if it was by the end of the first series or through the second, he becomes a completely passive and dim and happy little fantasy avatar dutifully following his path and obeying instructions. Eddings and his wife, however, have been revealed to be child abusing monsters, like Marion Zimmer Bradley and a few others. Fuck 'em. Let these books die.

Nigellicus: I suppose a good thing about college was that they kept giving me good books to read that I wouldn't have gone out of my way to read myself. This was one of them.

Nigellicus: I was living in an aprartment with two friends who were a couple, and got married while we were still there, in Chapelizod, just under the motorway. I actually got it for my then-girlfriend-now wife, and it's one of her favourite books, and I read it too, and it was hilarious.

Nigellicus: I had a touching faith in the idea that the big blockbusting novels that filled the shelves must be good, and if took me three or four times to actually get through one of a number of Ludlum, the problem must be me, until I finally managed it, twice actually, and came to a startling realisation: Ludlum is boring as shit. Also, kind of dumb.

Nigellicus: I never gave a damn about Batman, but if you picked up Watchmen, DKR couldn't be far behind. The pacing and the flow of the action amazed the hell out of me.

Nigellicus: Think I got this from the second hand bookshop that used to be next to The Roundhouse in Limerick. It was really good. They also had Legion, the sequel, but I never got that. Blatty turned out to be one of those authors that I read one great book by, then never get anything else by them. No idea why.

Nigellicus: I actualy got a proof copy of this when I was working in the bookshop in Dublin. Reminded me that I really liked space opera, a liking that kept being killed whenever I tried US military-space stuff.

Nigellicus: I read this partly because it seemed like the sort of book you read in college if you were and English student, but mostly because was fascinated by Gravity's Rainbow but this just looked easier to read. I was right. I feel like the horrofic bit in South Africa, the pre WW2 genocide of the tribes there, should be better known, as should the genocide itself, always slightly puzzled that it isn't.

Nigellicus: I was young enough to think that this was frightfully exciting and full of the most amazing ideas. Maybe it was? I only ever read two other Heinlien's, though. I just thought this and Friday? I think? the one about God and stuff? (No, Job.) were readable, and the others were not, they had that stodgy Golden Age prose style or just looked like books full of horrible people doing bad or boring things.

Nigellicus: Even when I read this I was struck by the way the protagonist speaks to his therapist (an AI therapist I think?) as if he'd never heard of a therapist (or an AI) before and he was wildly skeptical of either of them being real things. It turns out to be a tight, nasty little space treasure-hunt by desperate space treasure hunters, and I didn't get very far with the sequel because it spoiled the shape of this one.

Nigellicus: It was Summer, I was cycling to work, about eight or nine miles, four or five times a week to work in the Dunnes in the Parkway, and I was Into Fantasy, so I eventually picked this up, of course. I mention the summer/cycling/job because I can remember reading this at the back of a service station looking over a field and a river just down the road from the Parkway Roundabout. I thought the writing was good! My idea of good writing, apparently, was to start each chapter with a short declarative sentence, usually of the form 'the something was doing something.' Looking back, I can see that I really was not in love with these books - I gave up on Robert Jordan half a page into one of his prologues - and it was horror I was getting interested in, but I was a bit worried that it might be scary. It wasn't until it occurred to me that orcs and trolls and tentacled monsters in lakes and Ringwraiths were all HORROR monsters, so horror was just monsters from fantasy in the real world, that I finally jumped in.

Nigellicus: This was the book where I decided, you know what, Pynchon ain't for me. (I have three times tried to read Gravity's Rainbow since, some lessons need reinforcing.) It feels like a book that has a guy putting on a dress and waving a gold chainsaw around for his annual act of performative insanity to qualify for his welfare should be actually funny, and a book where jet flights are intercepted by mysterios black planes and passnegers are kidnapped or murdered by a secret government agency should be a lot more sinister or exciting, and it wasn't really any of those thing. Reading the book to get to those bits felt like fight my way through a thicket of brambles.

Nigellicus: Fot a while there Barker really was IT for me, even more than King who I read voraciously enough, and this blend of fantasy and horror was tailor-made for my teenage brain which was just moving away from fantasy and into horror, and the Barker's horror and fantasy were pure high-concept, a million miles ahead of everything else. I probably didn't reread it as muh as LOTR, but I still have my copy and that spine is CRACKED.

Nigellicus: This was the other Heinlein book I thought was ever so good and full of things that made me think. It was also highly blasphemous and irreverent, of course, something that always made me uncomfortable even though I stopped being particularly devout after my Confirmation (maybe I was still worried about going to Hell?) Here it was all safely contained withing the label of science fiction where for soe reason you could get away with this sort of thing. No idea how my brain worked, I really don't, but it did help me get over that mental block and allowed me to think more critically and imaginatively about religion, life and death, so I'll always be vaguely fond of it. Even so I don't actually remember much about it, except that Heaven at the end had scheduled orgies, which seemed like the sort of thing any decent Heaven would have.

Nigellicus: I can't remember if my brother mentioned this and he thought it was supposed to be good and I found a copy, or if I read his copy, but my brother was involved somehow. In the introduction Stephenson said he was trying to write like James Crumley, and I approved of that, though I don't think his asshole hero is as lovable as Sughrue or Milo, and while the eco-activism made a great basis for a neo-noir, some of the stuff he did was highly questionable, and I'm not sure the book actually knew it. (Snow Crash had something similar, mostly around the under-age romance.) Stephenson namechecked another author I approve of in an afterword to one of the Baroque Cycle books, Dorothy Dunnett. I've never been able to find that afterword in any of the current editions and can't locate the copy I read it in, so that's a bit odd, but it happened.

Nigellicus: My Mum got this for me when i was still in secondary sschool - I did ask her, i was getting in to LeCarre. At one point I was getting on a bus for a tour or something and one of the English teachers, not mine, was standing by the door, and he had his copy in his hand and I had my copy in mine. We passed each other like spies, knowing, but never acknowledging. I read most of this as an exam attendant, sitting in an empty corridor on boiling hot days for weeks on end. I also read Footfall, and this was much more challenging, subtle, ambiguous and more profoundly real and intelligent. Footfall was more fun, but I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole now. (Especially after reading Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker.) This, I will get back to. My wife got me the box set of the TV adaptation. I luvs my wife.

Nigellicus: I read the prologue in that anthology Tundra put out, but i can;t remember if i owned it. At the time it seemed like Another Doomed Alan Moore Project, like Big Numbers, but Eddie Campell, and family, by all accounts performed herculean labours to see the whole thing published and collected. I should sit down with it again some day, but it's a monstrous piece of work, really, I'd need a week or two uninterrupted.

Nigellicus: As a piece of writing this is quite insanely readable, as a book, it's an immense tour of a disitegrating city. These notes aren't meant to be reviews, though. It's an amzing novel though. Hey, didn't Stephen King mimic the ending for his Dark Tower series? It really worked in Dhalgren, it probably enraged King's readers.

Nigellicus: One of those books on the literary spinner in the bookshop that fascinated me, so eventually I bought it with a book token (I also got Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory and One Hundred Years Of Solitude with the same token, all from the same spinner, ten quid went a ways back in them days). I loved it, so, naturally, I never read anything else by Barnes. Why was I like that?

Nigellicus: I was too young to borrow from the adult library You had to be sixteen, I think?) in the Granary in Limerick, but I went in and browsed all the time (I was cycling in and out of Limerick pretty regularly, often with a bulging bag full of library books.) The blurb of this snagged my brain, though, an entire town? Vanished? What the hell! So, sneakily, or I thought I was being sneaky, I took it into the kids' section and read it there. All of it. In one day. Being brand new to horror tropes and conventions, I found the mystery staggeringly compelling, and the revelation was simply fantastic, and the whole thing was so exciting and scary and it made bits of my brain tingle with the sheer imaginative overlay of unreality on reality. I thought I was a Dean Koontz fan! I read more by him, until I realised that Stephen King was better, and Strangers, which also had a Big Mystery and was a Big Book, and had a spooky cover, had an ending that was boring and disappointing, and that's when I stopped reading Koontz, but this book has a special place in my heart. I will, of course NEVER reread it.

Nigellicus: If anyone's paying the slightest bit of attention to this list, which seems unlikely, they may or may not have noticed somehting about it, and whether they did or they didn't I'm drawing attention to it now: it's very, very male. Unconscious bias, you swine. There are exceptions, thank goodness, and Bujold is one. It's the underlying humour that caught me, as well as the basic humaneness. My copy is the one with the sword cane and the hand on the cover, a Bridge Street Book.

Nigellicus: You simply won't believe what this did to my tiny mind. To elaborate, I was in my secnd year at college when I read this, and the style and the structure and the anger of it changed something deep in my genes.

Nigellicus: Little space elephants invade! This is the one where the US government convened a team of science fiction authors to advise them on how to deal with an alien invasion because if we only listened to the science fiction writers everything would be fine. It was big spectacular widescreen fun, at the time. I was a corridor attendant for the leaving cert exams when I read this. Sitting in that corridor for long long hours with nothing to do but read. It was hell, I tell you.

Nigellicus: It's funny the books that stay with you, and the reasons why. i love Bujold, I love the Vorkosigan series, I love Chalion and Penrid, I even love about 98% of this. it's a romantic comedy, you can;t say in spaaaaace because I think it all takes place n a planet, but a sci fi romantic comedy, and it's full of charm and humour and romance. Romantic comedies, though, require happy endings, where everything comes into place for the couple or couples and all the threats major and minor are dealt with or banished or vanquished. So, in this case, it requires a law officer from another planet turning up in an effort to extradite the scientist who makes the beetles that are going to make everyone rich. Miles has, first of all, used the beuraucracy and legalities of his highly autocratic, non-democratic, run-by-aristocrats planet to keep the guy delayed in orbit for months. Honestly, that's just cruel, but he's an aristocrat, you see, from a noble family, it's a thing he can do for entirely selfish purposes if he wants to. Then when the guy finally turns up to arrest the criminal scientist and take him back to face justice, he abuses his power as an aristocrat and as a, whatever the special position they gave him was, I can't remember, in a string of arbitrary ways to protect the scientists so he and his friends can get rich and everyone can have a happy ending, except the guy trying to arrest the criminal. I was incandescent with rage, filled with empathy for the law guy confrnted with the sheer arrogance and unaccountable exercise of arbitrary power to protect a criminal. I fucking hated everyone on that miserable planet, all because of that one scene at the end of a fun book. I expected better of you, Miles. For shame.

Nigellicus: Took me a while to find this one. I was living in a cold room above a steep narrow street in Cork, might have still been in college and doing the same thing I'd done for the leaving cert, depserately trying to avoid thinking about my Impending Doom. Cherryh does the intense psychology of hopelessly uneven standoffs in incredibly vulnerable environments better than just about anybody.

Nigellicus: I was really, really into Star Wars for a while there. I mean REALLY into Star Wars. Without having seen a single one of the films, mind you. All through the books. I eventually did see them of course, but oh how I loved those books. This was the only one I read outside the trilogy, though, except for the odd comic. I just like the title, that's why I decided to go with it.

Nigellicus: Aaaand let this stand in for all the Nancy Drew books I nicked from my sister because back then reading was gendered, because of course it was, good thing those days are behind us, eh?

Nigellicus: Now this was a sort of rite of passage, buying and reading these. I'd read The Hellbound Heart in a Dark Visions collection I got from the library, and it had made quite an impression, (as did Lisaa Tuttle's and Ramsey Campbell's stories, it was a great book for a very dark November) but these blew, yes, my tiny wee mind, right out of the back of my skull. In The Hills The Cities! My God! That story! I was supposed to be attending a grindschool in Limerick one Easter before the Leaving cert, but I nipped down at lunch time and bought the first one, and the horrors of Clive Barker were much more relatable than the horrors of the educational system and my utter disconnect from it.

Nigellicus: I could barely handle the tension and the suspense, the mystery, the ultimate twist, and the sheer crushing downbeat grimness of Cormier but hoo boy was he compellingly readable. 'I want to read but I don't dare...'

Nigellicus: Mind blown yadda yadda. I'm beginning to think I developed a mild addiction to having my tiny mind blown. This series was much-loved by me and is, I think, perfect to give to a teenager who's just finished Lord Of The Rings and is wondering around with shiny eyes head full of elves and dwarves and hobbits and such. Nowadays I have problems with it, but I'll leave those for the other books in the series, if I ever get to them. Ok, i think I'm just going to post the first book in a series rather than all the books, so here's my thoughts: it was wayyyy too in live with its Luciferian villain, way to ready to rehabilitate him after his, what, three genocides? Now, he had the powers of a demi-god, so there's wasn't much they could actually do to him other than persuade him Not To Be Evil Any More, but it went beyond that, the book luuuurved him. We're all about the problematic faves these days, so this was ahead of its time.

Nigellicus: One more Clive Barker for the road, I remember reading this on a blindingly sunny day, sitting on a bridge halfway between my house and Limerick City. The idea was I would cycle to the library in Limerick to study because, yes, the Leaving cert was coming! Mostly, though, I was just trying to escape the sense of Impending Doom. Wow, things do come round, don't they?

Nigellicus: I liked this, it had the cool dry wit I like in a book. I didn't read any more by him. A while later, I saw a book by him and thought, I should read more of that guy, so I did, and it turned out it was The Cold Dish again. This is the sort of thing that could easily happen before online book catalogues. Dark times indeed.

Nigellicus: What a book. Dying to reread it. If only it came in audio. Oooh, I read this while on strike. I was working in Dunnes Stores in Douglas, Cork and we went on strike. We all went to a big Union meeting in City Hall and I fell asleep and snored so loud the crowd laughing woke me up. Anyway, we sat outside in the gorgrous summer sun and I read this.

Nigellicus: A big epic tale of mind vampires versus little people. It had everything you could want, including people being hunted on an island.

Nigellicus: Wasn't much left of my mind to blow, but blowed it got.

Nigellicus: I was entranced by this when i first read - look at me reading a proper novel! - one week when i was minding my sister's house, memorable for the time four hourses came galloping down the road,into the yard and two or three times round the house. Tried to reread it recently and oh my God he's so obnoxious, especially towards his sister. Feck off with your misogynistic Catholicism, twit.

Nigellicus: I'll let this stand in for the many, many, many Hardy Boys books I read when I was as tiny as my mind.

Nigellicus: I was so absorbed in reading this on the train I missed my stop, had to get out at the next stop and wait for the next south-bound train. It was pretty late, I was luck there was one more coming and I didn't get stranded.

Nigellicus: I'm not going to go through all of Blyton's series with investigators and flying chairs and magic trees, I read a small mountain of them, with all their classism, racism and sexism. Ate 'em up like scones with clotted cream, I did. You know, I should have gone with Secret Seven, because one of those was the first book my Mum got me when she realised I could read well ahead of my age. No idea which one, though. I remember something about being told to 'hoot like a screech owl' as a signal, and the person being told had no idea what a screech owl sounds like, but that could have been the Find Outers. This stuff made me delirious with excitement and thrills.

Nigellicus: I got to liking these when i was working in the bookshop in Limerick. I loved the elegant writing, the cool subdued wit, the overlay of cyncism on a profound romanticism. It set the template for the rest of his books, each of which is basically this, only different.

Nigellicus: Oh dear, I just told someone who enjoyed I Have No Mouth that I have this collection somewhere, but that there is one funny story in it, but that was a different Ellison collection I got from the library one time. *This* collection is a raw trip through Hell, isn't it?

Nigellicus: I've read a LOT of Cherryh, something that isn't reflected in my post-invention-of-the-internet online catalogues, but I have more books by her than any other author on my shelves. This was fantastic and epic and I was reading it when I first kissd my wife in a mountain lodge under Galteemor. Well, not *while* we were kissing, oh you know what I mean.

Nigellicus: I remember reading this and thinking how wonderful it was to occasionally find sci fi that was utterly absorbing without plots, conspiracies, action scenes, chases, or earth-shattering stakes. I wished I was better at finding books like that, and at reading them. Still do, really.

Nigellicus: I found studying in college impossible. I could never work out why. But every now and then something clicked. This was one of them, read over a few weeks in UCC's Boole Library. Should have been going to lectures of course. No wonder I have anxiety.

Nigellicus: The bit where he's diving in the gulf and the submarine comes at him out of the dark freaked me the fuck out more than any horror novel ever managed.

Nigellicus: HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE THIS THREE-FIGURE MARKETING CAMPAIGN I swear to God that's what the ad in the trade mag said - I may have the exact figure wrong - but I enjoyed this, completely bonkers, of course, just off the charts wildly, epicly bonkers.

Nigellicus: I left Dunnes Stores forever and hopped on a bus and went to galway, camped out by the sea and spent a week going to plays in the Arts Festival. I also read a big pile of books Imostly got from harlie Byrnes'. I got this somewhere else, though, and I was reading it before going to a performance of At Swim Two Birds in a schoolroom. The performers cooked sausages and gave them out to the audience during the performance. It was feckin brilliant. I always wanted to like Leonard more than I did. Id did *like* him, I read loads of his books and you couldn't make me do that at gunpoint if I didn't want to, but I found him slightly harder work to get through than I thought I should have, not quite the sheer brilliance everyone said about him. Bit like the way I found Chandler. This was a Raylan Givens, though, (love Justified) and he was always fun. (The other really fun Leonard book was Maximum Bob, also made into what I think was an under-rated and sadly cut short tv series.)

Nigellicus: I used to listen to BBC Radio 4 a lot, I mean A LOT, and one of their Books On 4 was this, read with the most amazing voice and I wish they'd play it again, but it sent me out looking for Caudwells, and they are wonderful.

Nigellicus: The great thing about science fiction is that it seems to retain the capacity to blow my tiny mind every now and then. This was by far the best philosophical/satiricaldramatic approach to religion and, as Morrow cannily realises what is at the core of it all, death. Neither something like Job by Heinlein, which I remember being more of a romp, and, say Preacher by Ennis and Dillon, which, lets face it, was pretty adolescent in its blasphemies and at heart another superhero story about standing up to The Biggest Bully Of All, had the chops to go full-on and confront actual real and terrible death the way Morrow does in this trilogy. The high concept alone is fantastic, God Is Dead and His body has fallen into the sea. The church want it towed to the Arctic and carefully hidden away to protect believer from the truth, a gang of atheists want it destroyed because it proves they were wrong all along. It's fantastic, funny, mordant, intelligent and exciting.

Nigellicus: My first james Lee Burke, borrowed from Cork City Library, read in a corner of that little park next to the river in UCC on a hot sunny day when. should have been studying and was instead running from the Impending Doom. They've built something huge and blocky in that little park since, and its gone from cool and shady to dark as Mordor.

Nigellicus: One of those ripped-from-the-headlines thrillers they loved ding in the seventies and eighties. I thought it was VERY exciting, and but my ignorance of the politics and history was absolute. He also wrote the one about the bomb in the cathedral with the cod-Irish terrorists, one of whom sort of quasi-mystically has the name Fionn bestowed on him by a stranger on a lonesome Ulster road, but even I knew there isn't an Irish person dead or alive who wouldn't have ripped the piss out of him for it until he died.

Nigellicus: I've read a couple of Kellermans, but this is the only one I remember for sure. After Silence Of the Lambs there was a vogue for cool, clever, calculating serial killers, which this overturned with a serial killer with a mind like a sewer, utterly repulsive. There was also a flashback to a brutal hand-to-hand fight during the ten days War that stuck with me. This is one of those books I read when I should have been studying for college exams, someone noticed I was reading it and they said hey, shouldnt you be studying for your exam and I tried to pretend that I was studying and the exam was on this very book, he did'lt believe me so I tried to pretend I'd been joking, he didn't believe that either.

Nigellicus: My then-girlfriend-now-wife worked in a library in Dublin, I worked in a bookshop in Limerick, wanted to do the Camino de Santiago for her President's Award, so we took two weeks off one summer. On the way out the door of the bookshop on the eve or departure i plucked a brand shiny new hardback of this off the shel and brought it with me. On reflection, I decided to leave it in athe storage locker with some of our other bits and pieces rather than tramp around the roads and tracks of Spain in the Spainish heat for ten days with it in my rucksack. I read it when we got to Santiago and stayed there for a few days. I can't remember what I read while tramping the roads, you can be sure I ws reading something, but I'm sure it'll come back to me. The night before we got home, Princess Diana died. Maybe I should include more big historical events with my notes. But honestly most of the time I was barely aware of what was going on in the rest of the world.

Nigellicus: What a happy little camper I was when i first found this my first Jonathan Carroll book in the Granary library. Slim little horror fantasies about beautiful clever people with beautiful clever friendships and beautiful clever love affairs who have whimsical thoughts and conversation about life and love and art and whose lives turn into very odd and increasingly sinister nightmares. Straight into my veins, please.

Nigellicus: Almost stopped when I realised it was in the presnt tense, how weird! Then I got used to it and actually it worked pretty good. A lot about the lost orange groves of California.

Nigellicus: A Bridge Street book. What a title, eh? Just the best title. I think I even remember whodunnit.

Nigellicus: It was okay. Pretty funny in parts. Slightly offputting in others, maybe? Never saw what the fuss was about, really. Even by the nineties, when I read this, conspiracy theories as entertainment and/or satire weren't anything wildly original.

Nigellicus: I always thought this was a third, obscure and neglected book in a loose thematic trilogy, with Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. Now thanks to LibraryThing I discover it's part of something called The Club Of Rome Quartet with those two and Shockwave Rider. It shares the same stylistic approach as Stand and Sheep, and it's all about violence and social fragmentation. I don't think it ends as downbeat as the other two, but I can't reread the bloody thing because the print on my copy is too damn small for my poor aching eyes.

Nigellicus: This is the book where I crashed out of Carroll, hard. I don't know if it was the switch fom first person to third person narrator, or if it was just that the two central characters realy were exceptionally insufferable narcissists completely full of themselves. All his characters are a bit like that, but somehow it was extremely magnified in this book. The only other thing I remember about it is the woman talking about how ugly a baby was. I HATED them. The ionly other beloved author this happened to was Lois McMaster Bujold. I got over that, bit I'm still leery of Carroll. What if all his books were exactly the same and I just hadn't noticed?