Not the least of our losses in this plague year was one of our greatest poets, Derek Mahon. Washing Up (Gallery Press) is a glorious late harvest - vigorous, funny, angry, blithe - beautifully produced, like all Gallery editions, and including, appropriately, a lovely tribute to another luminary of the dead poets society, Ciaran Carson. Mahon s last is vividly alive. Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters, edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten (Thames & Hudson) is a judicious selection from the magnificent six-volume Complete Letters of 2009. Had he not been a painter, Van Gogh could have made his name as a writer, as his correspondence shows. Impassioned, often heartbreaking, furious, funny and tender, these letters form a unique testament from a pivotal figure in 19th-century art. For my third choice, I am going to flout the rules by picking a book to be published in January 2021: Billy O Callaghan s Life Sentences (Cape) is a superb and moving novel of
Sinéad Crowley s books of the year
Updated / Friday, 11 Dec 2020
11:15
Author and RTÉ News Arts and Media Correspondent Sinéad Crowley rounds up her books of 2020
Well that was quite the year. I know many people vowed to read more books during the dark days of 2020, and I also know many of them ended up playing with their phones instead and that’s perfectly fine, because just getting through 2020 was an achievement in itself, without any need to feel bad about unrealised goals.
But for those of us who do enjoy reading, books were a lifesaver this year, transporting us to other places and, crucially, other times, where people shook hands with each other and exhaled indoors with wild abandon.
we fear artificial intelligence or not? is it a threat or not? kind of a once and for all determination. whether they make that determination, i don t know. but it s exciting stuff. what do you make of this change that we re going to see at the top of the pentagon? there s a sense, at least i have the sense that hagel was a little bit of a fall guy for problems that are much broader in this administration than him. are we going to see big differences with ash carter running the pentagon? fall guy, you think? yes, there is that sense. look you know my take on hagel is if you purposely try try to make yourself into a nothing man, you become a nothing man. he wanted to be the quiet leader of the pentagon. not the senator anymore. he was he wanted to be that background guy. he said this, he thought it was john kerry s guy to be the voice of the of u.s. foreign policy abroad. this was part of a