![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This Father’s Day weekend, I gave my Dad a book, and he gave me a bag of books. This seems a bit backwards to be but I am not complaining.
One of the books was a little old pocket-sized book of quotations about Irish stuff, straightforwardly named The Irish Quotation Book: A Literary Companion, edited by Mainchín Seoighe. It is a very delightful little book, with an array of quotations about Ireland and the Irish throughout history. Many of the quotations are by very famous Irish writers like Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, others are by less-famous Irish writers; some are by non-Irish writers who traveled into Ireland and wrote about it (Anthony Trollope says “The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they break my head”). They are arranged sort of by theme, although there are no section headings or chapters. Usually this is fine, with history gently progressing and thoughts meandering tangentially from subject to subject, but there is one section where there’s a quote about how all true Irish love horses and then the next quote is about families shutting themselves up in their tiny destitute cottages so no one could see them die during the Famine. It was a very jarring transition.
The overall picture that this paints is that Ireland is a beautiful green land filled with cows and history, and its people are friendly, witty in a rather silly way, Catholic, prone to extreme moods, and frequently very miserable due to everything in the country being run shitty from about 1600 onwards. They also write a lot of poetry. All of this is more or less consistent with the picture I had of Ireland and the Irish previously, although I learned some amazing new jokes.
Like a lot of “literary companions” and quotation collections, the thing I got most out of this book was a long list of longer works that I now want to check out. I’ve realized my Irish history is actually embarrassingly spotty, mostly half-understood stuff picked up sort of through osmosis and generalized nostalgia from growing up in an Irish-American family.
One of the books was a little old pocket-sized book of quotations about Irish stuff, straightforwardly named The Irish Quotation Book: A Literary Companion, edited by Mainchín Seoighe. It is a very delightful little book, with an array of quotations about Ireland and the Irish throughout history. Many of the quotations are by very famous Irish writers like Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, others are by less-famous Irish writers; some are by non-Irish writers who traveled into Ireland and wrote about it (Anthony Trollope says “The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they break my head”). They are arranged sort of by theme, although there are no section headings or chapters. Usually this is fine, with history gently progressing and thoughts meandering tangentially from subject to subject, but there is one section where there’s a quote about how all true Irish love horses and then the next quote is about families shutting themselves up in their tiny destitute cottages so no one could see them die during the Famine. It was a very jarring transition.
The overall picture that this paints is that Ireland is a beautiful green land filled with cows and history, and its people are friendly, witty in a rather silly way, Catholic, prone to extreme moods, and frequently very miserable due to everything in the country being run shitty from about 1600 onwards. They also write a lot of poetry. All of this is more or less consistent with the picture I had of Ireland and the Irish previously, although I learned some amazing new jokes.
Like a lot of “literary companions” and quotation collections, the thing I got most out of this book was a long list of longer works that I now want to check out. I’ve realized my Irish history is actually embarrassingly spotty, mostly half-understood stuff picked up sort of through osmosis and generalized nostalgia from growing up in an Irish-American family.