Summer Reading

Jimmy Fay, playwright

I gorge books and think I can get through a hundred pages a day but rarely can. Still, I like to balance authors off one another. I tend not to read on a beach, as it can be sandy, and you run the risk of sunburn. I prefer a hot fire, a glass of malt and a place way out on the west coast of Achill to read, deep into the night as the wind howls outside. But mostly it’s on buses or standing on the Luas.

I'm presently finishing Javier Marias's trilogy Your Face Tomorrow , a fascinating exploration of espionage and paranoia. It out-dreads le Carré's Smiley and can be racier than a Bond novel. I've just started Drood by Dan Simmons. It's a steampunk-Victorian tome my friend Mark O'Rowe gave me, and I'm loving its verve and energy. And I've also just started into Paul Murray's Skippy Dies .

As you can see, I’m a serial reader; I read 50 pages of one book, then 50 pages of another, and so on, until one dominates in narrative pull.

I love trilogies – there can be something really satisfying about them, like Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy. It deepens your original reading if the characters maintain fascination. Do I ever not finish a book? All the time, but I figure the good ones are lying under the bed waiting to be rediscovered like lost gems in dust.

Some books I enjoy so much I don’t want to finish, and anything I don’t like I leave on church pews.

As told to Tony Clayton-Lea