staff picks

If you enjoy film and want to stay in touch with the coolest flicks of all time then your local library is the place to go.

Last years Sight and Sound top ten films  of all times featured Hitchcock's "Vertigo" as number one.

This was the first time that Orsen Welles's "Citizen Kane" was knocked from top notch where it reigned from 1962 to 2002 to second place .

This list is compiled every decade by top film critics from around the world. We are proud to say that Dublin City Public Libraries have six of the best top ten in stock with the other four on order. Read more »

Between 1845 and 1850, out of a population of approximately 8.2 million, some one million died and another million were forced to emigrate. By 1881 the population had fallen to 5.2 million and continued to fall for many more years. The Great Famine, otherwise known as the Great Hunger, impacted on Ireland and her people like no other event in history, and in world terms the famine is rightly termed one of the greatest catastrophes of the modern era.

In recent times a number of new histories of the great famine have been published, and having just finished reading one of these, I thought I might stir your interest in this period of Irish history by reference to those recent publications that have come to my attention.  Read more »

While some people like to escape to the sun for Christmas, many prefer the embrace of a traditional white christmas. Whichever group you fit into, maybe one or other of these books might allow you to escape, in a fashion, to the sun or, if it is your preference, to more northern climes. The following are just some of the books I have read in recent months and I hope you get to enjoy them. So travel with me to Australia, South Africa, Iceland, Norway and Sweden!

Going to sunnier regions...

To Australia first. 'The Bat'  is the first in the Harry Hole series by Norwegian Jo Nesbo, but the last to be translated, reason being I understand is that the publisher thought the others in the series more marketable as they were based in Norway, while this novel is based in Australia. In this, Harry is sent to Sydney to assist the investigation into the murder of a young Norwegian woman, it being a race against time to catch the serial killer before he strikes again. Harry is here teamed with an Aboriginal police officer, the Aboriginal aspect being strong in this book. You also learn something of Harry the person, while his problem with alcohol raises its ugly head also. A gritty ending as you come to expect from Nesbo. Read more »

I love the long, warm, bright summer evenings - but the long, chilly, dark winter evenings have their charms too, as long as I have something good to read. The girls in my house have stored up some special reads for those lazy days between Christmas and New Year. We've had to banish the chosen books from sight so we're not tempted to start reading immediately - there lies grave danger of no present buying, pudding making, tree trimming or other essential ingredients of Christmas. Read more »

You might well wonder, where does Scotland meet Germany? Or to be more precise, where does Glasgow meet Hamburg? The answer lies in the person of Craig Russell, Scottish-born author and the creator of two wonderful crime series, one set in Hamburg, the other, needless to say, in Glasgow.

The series set in Hamburg stars Detective Jan Fabel, he being half-Scottish and half-German, and stems from Russell's interest in the culture and people of Germany. Russell, born in Fife in Scotland in 1956, is an ex-policeman and fluent German speaker, and his Fabel series have been a big success not alone in Germany but elsewhere, having been translated into 23 languages. Read more »

While Nordic authors and settings seem to dominate my crime reads, the list is not exclusively Northern European I am glad to say. I have even endeavoured to go beyond wider Europe, taking in the US of A, the Middle East, south-east Asia, and even Africa. And it is to Africa that I travel in this post, with two authors to mention, South Africa's Deon Meyer (see below) and Southern Rhodesia's (aka Zimbabwe's) Alexander McCall Smith. McCall Smith a Rhodesian, you might ask? Well, while living in Scotland, he is correctly speaking a Rhodesian-born Scotsman who has also spent some considerable time in Botswana. A prodigious writer, he is probably best known as the author of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. The agency is located in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. So far the series extends to thirteen titles, of which I have to date read two. Read more »