Lately I unfortunately haven't been reading at all! Most of my downtime has been eaten up by watching ridiculous amounts of films (I've watched a huge glut of movies from the 20s up to the 60s), and then going to bed late so even my late night reading has taken a massive dive because then I'm too tired to want to read. So I've had three books on hold for several months now. It's not helped by the lack of a good reading place in my house - the sitting room is too open and usually my mother is watching TV in the evening, and I don't have a comfortable chair in my room, so most reading is on my bed which I don't think is actually very good.

The first is Poor Green Erin, a collection of German travel writings about Ireland put together and translated by Eoin Bourke. The book is in the pub I work in, so I only ever read a few bits of it when things are quiet, and usually I'm either doing something or chatting to the customers. Still it's very interesting, if a little repetitive - mostly fellas waxing lyrical about the Irish landscape and denouncing landlord absenteeism and the consequent extreme poverty of the native Irish. People remember the Famine but tend today to forget the abject misery in which Irish people lived for hundreds of years before that.

One of two books currently sitting by my bedside is Gafa by Ré Ó Laighléis. The title means "caught"; it's a novel about a family in which the son is addicted to heroin and he's blackmailing his father (who's having an affair). It's the third Irish book I've read, and indeed the third in any language other than English. Hence why I'm only halfway through despite its slimness; the extra effort of reading in another language and needing to translate unfamiliar words puts me off. I have another of his books lined up for whenever I do finish it. It's nice to read an original book in Irish - the last I read, Choinnigh do Mhisneach (Keep your Courage), was a translation from Welsh. The first was years ago - Favela, a book written in Irish about the favela in Rio, by a Dutch guy. Yeah...

The last is something completely different and I'm surprised I haven't gobbled it up because it's right up my alley. I've just about reached the point in Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki Expedition where they actually start setting sail across the Pacific.

It's time to start reading again! I had been hoping to polish off the 30 or so unread books I have laying around, and have only made a modest rent in them so far.