One of the strangest effects of this transition was that it rekindled very ancient human behaviors. The scroll, one of the earliest technologies for reading, returned, as did the oldest form of writing, the ideogram, reincarnated in the emoji panel. In this weird, narrow sense, opening a paperback in 2019 was more modern than texting with your friends.
The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. Escaping into the pages of “This Is Happiness” feels as much like time travel as enlightenment. Halfway through, I realized that if I didn’t stop underlining passages, the whole book would be underlined.
As a novelist, Robert Harris has a gift of immersing readers in an unfamiliar milieu, and thrilling them with the subsequent emotional, physical and ethical challenges faced by the protagonist as he (and it is always he) navigates mounting obstacles to a supposedly routine task — and, in the process, unearths unexpected truths.
As self-described writer, author, and environmentalist Tiffany Francis makes clear in her newly released nature narrative, Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night, humans have a long, storied history of associating darkness with evil and death. “Not only does the night conceal,” Francis writes, “it transforms things we once recognised by daylight, mutates and changes them into something unknown, unwelcome.” The folktales that scared us as kids sometimes grip us well into adulthood, precluding the possibility of feeling at ease with the unknown of a dark night.