A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut

This "memoir of life in George W Bush's America" is, as you'd expect, quirky, angry, and funny, with the author sharing witty and perceptive opinions on socialism, art, politics, religion, relationships, the environment... His view of modern society is pretty bleak (psychopathic personalities are in charge, "we are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial", and it's too late to do anything about it) but he includes a rather beautiful requiem for life on Earth, and urges us, despite this, to "please notice when you are happy", and reflect, as an elderly relative used to, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is". The most memorable part for me was a brief section on the decline of extended families ("A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit.") His analysis that women want "a whole lot of people to talk to [...] about everything" and that most marital arguments can be interpreted as the couple saying to each other, "You are not enough people!" resonated with me during a period where, having just moved abroad, I was expecting my husband to fill the gaps left by my missing friends and listen to everything I wanted to talk about...

Breakfast on Pluto - Patrick McCabe

I was curious about this book as I had enjoyed the film, which I remembered as quite quirky and upbeat, but either I had misremembered the film, or the source material was a lot darker. The central character, a transvestite prostitute obsessed by the idea of his true mother, comes across as extremely fragile and delusional, and the political situation in Northern Ireland is more central to the story than I'd remembered, with the fate of the trio of friends seeming to portray possible outcomes of traumatic situations: one is killed, another (the main character) escapes into a fantasy world, and the third eventually moves forward to a healthier future. The writing is witty and tender, however, and the humanity of the characters prevents the often bleak subject matter from becoming depressing.

In One Person - John Irving

When I started reading this, it was a few weeks after I picked it up at the library, and I'd forgotten why I'd selected it and who it was by. A couple of pages in, I was startled by a sudden jolt of recognition on reading a sentence (a parenthetical sentence, with a key word italicized) that was so typical of John Irving, it was like unexpectedly bumping into an old friend. Thankfully, in this case the old friend hadn't changed too much, and we still got on very well. The book was packed with comfortingly familiar settings and themes, although the extremely frank and specific descriptions of the central character's sexual experiences and preferences were a little unsettling at times. I found the section of the book dealing with the AIDS epidemic to be particularly powerful, especially a sad anecdote about the panic caused when the central character has a nosebleed while training at the wrestling club where his sexuality had previously been grudgingly accepted. Unfortunately I felt that the ending fell a little flat (perhaps because the characters were eclipsed by the desire to deliver a message?) but overall I found this to be an enjoyable read.