Category: Contemplation

Contemplation

Contemplating early spring skies, water, and fields

and realising that often images are enough without words…

Image of a long, frost-covered field with an orange sunrise in the distance against dark trees.
Image of rolling vegetation-covered cliffs leading to a small beach and a stormy sea with a dark, rainy sky overhead.
A pair of sleeping swans on fresh water with the reflection of dark trees showing in the water.
Contemplation, On Reading

Books of the Year 2025

I was delighted when John Lavin of the great Lonely Crowd asked me to write about my book of the year. Over the past year I’ve read so many great books, both newly published, and classics. I’m currently reading another brilliant one (Tania Hershman’s It’s Time: A Chronomemoir Guillemot Press, 2025). So how did I narrow my list down? I selected a fiction and a non-fiction book that chimed with each other and touched on something akin to magic, in how these two texts explored the body, and creativity, and pathways to and of living.

Check out the Lonely Crowd‘s Books of Year Part 1, Part 2 (where you’ll find my recommendations), and Part 3.

Wishing everyone continued happy reading. May the written word bring you peace and comfort in these last weeks of 2025 and into the new year of 2026.

Image of a sandy path leading out of a forest towards a beach with the sea in the distance, Wexford. Photograph (c) Shauna Gilligan
Contemplation, Writers Read

Reading and Consideration

Now that the brighter days are here (though they have already started to shorten), I’m starting another reading and consideration bout; a lovely mix of stories, poetry, philosophy, essays, fiction and non-fiction. I assembled the pile for physical balance rather than any particular order. The following books appear from top to bottom in the photograph above:

  • Mary O’Donnell Walking Ghosts (Mercier, 2025)
  • Mary Oliver A Poetry Handbook (HarperCollins, 1994)
  • Max Porter Shy (Faber, 2023)
  • Susan Sontag As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (Picador, 2012)
  • Nóirín Ní Riain Sacred Rituals (Hachette, 2023)
  • Greg Dinner Fragments (Ogham & Dabar Books, 2025)
  • Gerald Dawe Catching the Light (Salmon, 2018)
  • Philip Marsden Under a Metal Sky (Granta, 2025)
  • Jan Zalasiewicz How to Read a Rock (The History Press, 2022)