Barefoot in Mullyneeny
As I surf at high-speed around the Internet looking for blog fodder, it appears that you-know-who has taken over the world. So I’ll do something old fashioned and tell you what book I’m reading. My sister sent me a book in the mail from the UK for my birthday a while back and I ignored it until a few days ago.
When I saw Barefoot in Mullyneeny by Bryan Gallagher, I thought ‘Oh Sweet Lord, not another book about growing up as a starving kid in Ireland.’ Not so long ago, I read (and struggled with) Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and that was quite enough thank you.
Barefoot in Mullyneeny is excellent because each chapter is a remarkably easy-to-read short story about growing up in the 1940s in Northern Ireland when people still went to village dances and wore cloth caps all the time, even when playing football. Plus it seems people enjoyed themselves rather than endured endless misery.
Before starting the Barefoot book, I’d even picked up the 30th anniversary edition of Roots - a freebie from Book Expo America in May - but after 20 pages I noticed that it was more than 800 pages long. I put it back down and won’t be reading it. Some of the stories in Barefoot in Mullyneeny are as short as a page and half and they still finish with a sharp ending. I don’t think I can face an 800-page book in the height of summer even if it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Perhaps I need to organise my reading better - Frank Deford’s Everybody’s All American (football star crumbles), Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (child soldier in Africa), and Manhunt (Lincoln’s killer flees) by James Swanson have been on my to-read list for a long time and I should get around to buying them.
