{"id":447,"date":"2010-09-02T10:20:31","date_gmt":"2010-09-02T10:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/?p=447"},"modified":"2010-09-02T10:20:31","modified_gmt":"2010-09-02T10:20:31","slug":"reading-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/?p=447","title":{"rendered":"Reading Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Over the summer I always try to catch up on my reading but this is never successful because I generally find bookshops and buy more\u00a0books. On holiday in Dalkey just south of Dublin I purchased Fintan O’Toole’s excellent Ship of Fools<\/span><\/em>\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0 from the local “Exchange” bookshop and it has proved to be a fascinating if not frustrating read. The Excahnge bookshop is situated in Dalkey’s main drag, Castle Street\u00a0just along \u00a0from the original public library building (1901) and the newly built public library where, despite the contradictory signs of “free Wifi available here” and “the use of mobile phones is not permitted” I managed to crouch in the general non-fiction\u00a0section (signed Neamhfhicsean<\/em> – for Irish speakers)\u00a0to connect my iPhone to the outside world.<\/p>\n

Another bookshop visited was the wonderful Secret Bookshop – in the centre of the city (but I obviously can’t tell you where!) \u00a0Here I bought, for\u00a0just 5 Euros, Niall Murphy’s A Bloomsday\u00a0Postcard<\/span><\/em><\/a>\u00a0a selection of 250 postcards all posted in Dublin during\u00a01904. Edwardian Dublin had six postal deliveries a day and one on Sunday and the sending of postcards was extremely popular and indeed reliable as evidenced by one card sent by a young man to his sweetheart asking her to meet with him that very same day\u00a0at Kingstown station (near Dalkey). Many of today’s institutional e-mail systems are less reliable.<\/em>\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

Cutting back through Trinity College to catch the brilliantly named DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transport train) back to Dalkey, I stopped in the TCD boohshop and picked up (half-price 9.99 Euros pbk) Berhard Meehan’s The Book of Durrow<\/span><\/em><\/a>\u00a0which contains 40 full-colour reproductions and a very interesting text. This has reminded me of my probably over ambitious plan, some while back now, \u00a0to host an exhibition of illuminated Qur’ans, from the\u00a0Chester Beatty Library<\/span> \u00a0<\/a>here in the Grove Library, at Bradford College.
\nBack to my own summer reading challenge – while driving from Oxford to Winchester\u00a0en route to the South Downs for a camping trip I was, amid all the flurry of media interest in public libraries, excited to see signs for a reading festival – how proper I thought. Of course it later emerged that this was the Reading (and Leeds) Festival where, according to my guitar hero son, the Libertines did an amazing comeback performance. The Buzzcocks are playing around the corner at Myrtle Park festival<\/span> <\/a>on Friday night if anyone fancies it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the summer I always try to catch up on my reading but this is never successful because I generally find bookshops and buy more\u00a0books. On holiday in Dalkey just south of Dublin I purchased Fintan O’Toole’s excellent Ship of Fools\u00a0\u00a0 from the local “Exchange” bookshop and it has proved to be a fascinating if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sandbox2.learnerinformatics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}