This Month in Stuff
November 2025
Reading - Deirdre Madden Authenticity
No one on the island of Ireland writes better than Deirdre Madden. She writes sentences with a unique sense of music, and I reckon her readers could identify a Madden sentence among a hundred others. Plot is not really her thing, which is good. It means there’s more room for the language and, crucially, the thinking. Each of Deirdre Madden’s novels are best thought of as explorations of a central question or as a meeting point for a few ideas. Time Present and Time Past examines, as you might expect, the movement of time, the functions and fictions of memory and rubbishes the notion that time is easily separated into past, present and future.
Molly Fox’s Birthday, her most celebrated novel, builds a memorable picture of its eponymous character in her absence, as a friend spends one day (this is my favourite Irish novel set over one day - Joyce be damned) in her house. It is scandalously well written.
Authenticity is Madden at her best, too, and at her longest. A typical Madden novel hovers around the 60k mark, I’d imagine. This one exceeds 300 pages, and paints an intricate portrait of an artist, visiting the central question ‘what is an authentic life?’ from various angles. Its opening section is one of the best beginnings to a novel, and the circular shaped finish is brilliant. It is a novel to read a few times, I suspect, and this is my second go at it.
Listening - flipturn and The Sundays
Just discovered flipturn a month or so ago through their single August from a few years ago. Immediately listened to everything they have recorded, saw them live in Belfast the next week, and have had them on repeat ever since. Swimming Through the Trees is lyrically brilliant; Sad Disco is an ear worm; and Glistening is a perfect driving song.
But August.
August is one of the best songs of all time. I challenge you to listen and disagree.
And the cover art of their new album Burnout Days, is sublime.
I want to write more about The Sundays in relation to the novel I have coming out (I may bring this up a few times), as they have provided something of a soundtrack to my writing world. But my most listened to song of 2025 is their classic This is Where the Story Ends and it is fantastic. This is just the tip of their iceberg.
It also has the greatest example of internal rhyme in pop history: it’s that little souvenir of a terrible year.
More to say in another post. (did I mention there’s a novel coming out next year?)
Watching - Before Sunrise dir. Richard Linklater
Brilliant from start to end. Best of the trilogy, too.