Damien Mulley

(Eason’s Mahon Point Cork, filed under M for Major in Irish Fiction)

Figures from Nielsen BookScan have shown that Twenty Major’s first book “The Order of the Phoenix Park” have sold 536 copies up to March 15th. Given the book came out at the start of March, that’s very good going for the market in Ireland at this time of year. I believe these figures don’t include online sales either. Well done Twenty!

I read the book recently and I think it’s the first humour book I finished. I’m not a fan of humour in books, I’m not a fan of comedies at all apart from the League of Gentlemen. I don’t find many things at all funny (really) but I very much got a kick out of this book. I found it slightly hard to get into the book first as that ginger avenger albino character freaked me out a little but I must say I was laughing out loud a lot of the time while reading it and chuckling away as I turned every page. It’s a great book and deserves greater attention. My favourite character is Grace Jones Taxi Driver. You’ll see. I really like that the Jimmy the Bollix character gets more attention too. There are some great bits in the book where the author plays with the reader too. I won’t say what but I liked that technique. Fourth wall and all that. Just a warning: I’m using the word cunt a lot more now after reading this book and I had been weaning myself off it. Not everyone will like this book because that whole thing about tastes and choices comes into play, not that would ever stop a reviewer using Twenty’s book as an excuse to attack their own inabilities or insecurities or the fact that Twenty now somehow represents all forms of blogging past, present or future.

You know what’s great too about the book? The way it’s pissing off so many print “journalists” and hacks. The same ones who work for papers that steal from blogs week in week out and fail to give any kind of attribution because that might give more credibility to blogging and show them up to be self-serving lazy cunts who rarely do any legwork anymore. Oh hang on, have I just made a mass generalisation here without doing proper research? Maybe this is what some people including bloggers mean by Irish blogging “getting there”? Getting to where? Being the same as everything else we had up to now? Joy. That’s worked.

Oh wow, my review of Twenty’s book has turned into a not so veiled attack on a whole group. Like rain on a wedding day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 5:53 pm and is filed under business, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.