The need to read.

Age 14 I was going to the library every day. It was in an old church in the middle of a small town, with a venerable holm oak outside. You went in through the church porch, soft stone unreconstructed.

The girl by the window in DLR Lexicon, the new library in Dun Laoghaire, architectural event between the Marine Hotel and the sea, needs to read: Jane Austen. A woman on the train was reading Murder at Pemberley. Here's a man who has just finished a PhD on Duchamp. He leans up and down the book stall we are tending. What would you recommend? he asks. How to write round things. Another who works in the legal business and esteems Séan ó Riordáin. What would I recommend for his bedtime reading? Local. I live on the hill where Séan ó Riordáin lived; many times I saw him outside his house gazing westward. Should have guessed he was a poet.

My bedtime reading at the moment is Edith Pearlman. She has knocked open the dream channel. In the morning I can remember neither my several wild dreams nor the story I read.