Remember that books are not just for Christmas

Like a dog, a book is not just for Christmas – but it’s a hell of a good place to start. And with the selection of new publications hitting the shelves for the season that’s in it, there really is something there to suit every taste.

By now we’re working on the basis that you got a book token rather than a book – and there could be one of three reasons for that.

Someone doesn’t know you well enough to know your taste in reading material, what books you books you already have – or they simply ran out of time or motivation.

And yet it rules out the possibility of getting it completely wrong – or seeing you end up with four copies of the one book, like someone stuck with a kitchen full of toasters after their wedding.

So – completely randomly – here’s a few that has passed this week in recent weeks; all of them completely different, but sharing one common characteristic.

They’re Irish.

Cookery books are always a good option – even for those of us who cannot cook – because the quality of the best of them just has to be seen to be believed.

Michael O’Meara owns Oscar’s Bistro in Galway city and his tome – because, at 440 pages, a book doesn’t do it justice – is called Sea Gastronomy: Fish and Shellfish of the North Atlantic.

It is a cookery book but also the most insightful history of a subject he knows better than anyone – the photography is breath-taking and this stands up to anything produced in this genre anywhere in the world.

At the other end of the scale – only in terms of age – is All in the Cooking, which first saw the light of day in 1946 as the official text book of the cookery school at Cathal Brugha Street College.

Others will remember it from their domestic science days – but it is simple, straightforward and sort of nostalgic in the way that Soundings brought back memories for English Leaving Cert students of a certain age.

Nostalgia plays a part too in A Fly Never Lit, edited by journalist PJ Cunningham and with contributions from a host of familiar names all on the theme of rural Ireland and growing up in a different time.

Memories of a more recent – and political – vintage abound in Eamon Gilmore’s Inside the Room, which tells the story of his rise and fall, leading Labour into Coalition with record seat numbers…and then his departure as the polls showed another tide of the left flowing out.

Next year will be all about the centenary of 1916 – but if you want to get a real insight into a subject we skirted around for most of the last 100 years, then the Easter Rebellion; a New Illustrated History by Conor McNamara will answer all questions.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.