The book I am currently reading
I am rereading Jim Harrison’s book of poems Letters to Yesenin. The poem is an epic suicide note to a suicide, but Harrison says that it doesn’t come to him like a burning bush or a pillar of light but he has decided to stay.
The book that changed my life
My father [Sean] wrote a children’s soccer book, Goals for Glory, in the 1970s. It was read aloud by one of my teachers at school in Dublin. When Georgie Goode, the hero, scores the winning goal it set my class alight: one of my friends danced on the desk. And I remember thinking: that goal came from the inside of my father’s head.
The book I wish I’d written
I adore Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, about the jazz musician Buddy Bolden. It is only late in the book that the title explains itself when a train goes through the small town of Slaughter, Louisiana, but before that we come through all sorts of beauty and slaughter.
The book that had the greatest influence on my writing
I met the Irish writer Benedict Kiely when I was 16 years old. He wrote a collection that included the story “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly”, a tale of not-quite requited love that involved a priest, a literary scholar who could “puke you with poetry”, and a half-Japanese prostitute named Butterfly. After reading that there was nowhere to go but everywhere.
The book I think is most underrated
Kiely is on my mind I suppose but his little gem Proxopera is maybe the greatest book written about what we call “The Troubles”. But if I was to plump for another book, there’s a gorgeous little fable called Fup that was written by Jim Dodge. It sounds odd, but it’s the fable of a duck called Fup - it doesn’t take long to figure it’s Fup Duck.
The book that changed my mind
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Not just making the invisible visible, but a recognition of the grace that comes with proper deep down empathy.
The last book that made me cry
Stoner by John Williams. A classic – about a professor of English in midwest America of all things – that has recently being resurrected by readers and literary critics alike.
The last book that made me laugh
Andy Sean Greer put a smile on all sides of my face with his Pulitzer winner, Less.
The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
Oh gosh I’m sad to admit that I’ve never read Finnegans Wake by James Joyce all the way through. I’ve dabbled in it – a way, a lone, away, alone – but never completed the riverrun.
The book I give as a gift
To a student, an empty Moleskine notebook. To a loved one, a Moleskine with a poem inside.
The book I’d most like to be remembered for
My most recent novel, Apeirogon. I would like people to know the two main characters, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, who are my real-life heroes.
My earliest reading memory
Mary Lavin’s The Second Best Children in the World. I read it when I was around seven I suppose. It’s a story about kids who decide that – in order to give their parents a rest – they will go on a long trip around the world. It strikes me now, years later, that the book is a song for an emigrant. Leaving is a form of memory-making. Occasionally we are allowed the grace of being able to go home.
My comfort read
I would read and reread Louise Erdrich’s Tracks for the first line alone: “We started dying before the snow and, like the snow, we continued to fall.”
This article was amended on 5 March 2021. The line quoted above is from Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, rather than the same author’s Love Medicine as an earlier version said.